The prevalence of Language Development Disorders (LDD) in school-age children without signs of genetic or neurological disorders, and without other added difficulties, is 2-3%. In Europe there is no homogeneity in terms of action with this group, so this work presents the results found, using a program called Program for Linguistic Stimulation of Oral Expression (designed by the authors). It is used in the syntax of 33 Spanish children with LDD, in order to demonstrate that its use is effective in children with these difficulties and, therefore, it is essential that professionals know about it and this way, they can work with this program with their students, since it is very useful to improve the language of these children and therefore improve inclusion in the classroom.

Children with LDD have difficulties in all or some of the dimensions of language: phonetic-phonological, semantic, pragmatic and, finally, the syntactic dimension. The syntactic dimension is what interests us in this research. Syntax studies the order and relationship of words or syntagmas in sentences and the functions they include. Children with LDD have poor expressive language and syntax errors, which causes various school difficulties; For this reason, in this work the average length of the sentences, the number of sentences, and whether or not they are capable of performing subordinates will be studied, in addition to knowing the opinion of the speech therapists who use the program. Regarding these difficulties, there are studies that explain how children with a LDD have more grammatical errors than children with typical language development: they make shorter and simpler sentences, and tend to omit the verb on many occasions. This causes children with LDD not to generate sentences, since it is necessary to include a verb to consider an expression as a sentence. In this way, we show the need to develop a tool for children with LDD to improve the syntactic dimension of their language.

There are other programs to improve the grammatical skills of students with LDD, such as that of Ramírez-Santana et al. (2018) that focuses on the combined use of oral narratives and morphosyntactic activities, or the study by Zwitserlood, et al. (2015) in which children with LDD are intervened through a metalinguistic tool with the aim of improving their syntax; Sim-Lock, Leitao, Lambert & Nickels (2013) assess the effectiveness of a group treatment to improve grammar in children with LDD. All of them are syntax-specific programs, but what happens when we apply an oral expression program designed to improve all the dimensions of the language? Will children with LDD make the same progress in their syntax as with a program designed exclusively to develop it? This is what is intended to demonstrate in this work.

The method that has been carried out and the main conclusions of the study will be explained bellow.

This research is based on a pre-experimental repeated measures pre-post quantitative research method in which there is a single group (Campbell & Stanley, 2015). The work is carried out from a mixed data collection method since we combine the use of a standardized, quantitative test with semi-structured qualitative interviews (Molina-Azorín & Fetters, 2020). The procedure consisted of using the Oral Expression Linguistic Stimulation Program (Ayuso & Ruiz, 2020) in 33 students with LDD, with an average of 51.42 months (σ = 10,997), in various pedagogical centers in Spain. The evaluation was carried out with the sheet 1 of the 3-year, 4-year and 5-year stimulus notebook of the Revised Oral Language Test of Navarra PLON-R (Aguinaga et al., 2005). This slide was used in order to obtain the number of sentences they make, the average length of the sentence and whether or not they are able to say subordinates. This test was applied at the beginning and at the end of the intervention. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of the six speech therapists who applied the program, to find out their opinion on the effectiveness of the program. The Oral Expression Linguistic Stimulation Program according to Ayuso and Ruiz (2020) consists of three phases: (a) PowerPoint pictures with words are shown to the children and the meaning of the words are explained, when the children does not know the word, it is used in a sentence, (b) games and activities are carried out with the unknown words, and (c) PowerPoint pictures are shown again, but in a faster way and, this time, they are only named. The words are different in each session, and the number of sessions also varies according to the age of the children: 3-year-olds receive 14 sessions, 4-year-olds 16 sessions, and 5-year-olds 21 sessions.

Children with LDD present difficulties in syntax, and the results of their stimulation with the Oral Expression Linguistic Stimulation Program are promising, since after quantitative analysis with the W-Wilcoxon test, we can determine that there is a significant difference between the initial and final evaluation of the participants, in terms of the number of sentences and the average length of the sentence. This improvement in the syntax can be found in other programs such as that of Ramírez-Santana et al. (2018), Zwitserlood et al. (2015) and that of Sim-Lock et al. (2013), but as we have already indicated, they are programs designed exclusively to improve syntax, unlike the program presented in this work, which is generic to enhance all dimensions of language. In relation to the number of subordinates, we observed that the children were not able to say subordinate at first, but in the final evaluation we observed that 12.5% of the children were capable of expressing subordinate sentences in their speech. We show that only 5-year-old children improve in this aspect, this result is expected since children with normotypic language development begin to say subordinate at 4 years of age and do not have full control until they are 6 years old (Bermeosolo, 2016; Peñaloza, 2017). The opinion of the speech therapists is somewhat uneven, 66.67% think that children have improved in this syntactic dimension, and 33.33% think that children have not advanced as desirable in their grammar due to their bad behavior and attention difficulties. As a conclusion, we can determine that the Oral Expression Linguistic Stimulation Program achieves evident advances and improvements in the syntax (length of sentences, number of sentences and use of subordinates) of children with LDD.

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