In clinical practice, the coexistence of several disorders is increasingly encountered. This is the case with the relationship between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). ADHD is one of the most frequently found neurodevelopment disorders in children and adolescents (De la Barra, Vicente, Saldivia & Melipillan, 2015), and is characterised by attention deficit, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. For this coexistence, the DSM 5 classification (APA, 2013) indicates 5% for schoolchildren, with an 8% peak for children aged 6–9 years. These figures are age-dependent and lower with adolescence, with a prevalence of 2.5% in adulthood. It is defined as developmental language disorder (DLD) to designate those other children that the severe affectation in oral language occurs without an associated disorder or a clear explanation that justifies (Andreu, Ahufinger, Igualada & Torrent, 2021; Bishop, Snowling, Thompson, Greenhalgh & Catalise Consortium, 2016, 2017). The prevalence of DLD is around 6% and 7% for children aged 5 years or more (Mendoza, 2016; Temblin et al., 1997).
Some studies conducted in the last decade have evidenced between approximately 10% and 40% of cases in children and adolescents with ADHD + DLD symptoms (Mueller & Tomblin, 2012; Peets & Tannock, 2011; Williams & Lind, 2013). Conti-Ramsden, Bishop, Clark, Norbury & Snowling (2013) state that ADHD is a similar disorder to DLD as regards its prevalence, and it is considered comparable to DLD as far as the severity of its impact is concerned.
Regarding the linguistic profile, certain similarities and differences between both disorders can be found. For example, people with DLD have great difficulty in correctly developing expressive syntax (Durrleman & Delage, 2016; Roy et al., 2013; Zwitserlood, Weerdenburg, Verhoeven & Wijnen, 2015) when using verbs in different tenses (Grinstead et al., 2014; Rispens & De Bree, 2014), and with morphological markers (Domahs, Lohmann, Moritz & Kauschke, 2013; Geurts & Embrechts, 2008; Rothweiler, Chilla & Babur, 2010). In both disorders, not only do individuals make these mistakes in syntactical production, but they also syntactical understanding (Montgomery, Evans, Gillam, Sergeev & Finney, 2016). In ADHD, morphosyntax also appears as one of the most altered areas (Flake, Lorch & Milich, 2006). People diagnosed with ADHD perform morphological expression tasks worse (Brook & Boaz, 2005). These three areas are related mainly to the syntactic domain and indicate special difficulty when organising language, as other studies have suggested (Delgado-Mejía, Etchepareborda, Bakker & Rubiales, 2013; Miranda-Casas, Ygual-Fernández & Rosel-Remirez, 2004; Väisänen, Loukusa, Moilanen & Yliherva, 2014).
People with ADHD have some problems in the form and structure that language takes (Rapin & Dunn, 2003). Their vocabulary is more limited (Barini & Hage, 2015; Gremillion, Smith & Martel, 2017), and they have less capacity for semantic processing (Segal, Mashal & Shalev, 2015; Tannock, Martinussen & Frijiters, 2000). Individuals with DLD develop altered vocabulary (Laws et al., 2014; Rice & Hoffman, 2015), and face specific semantic difficulties (Schulz, 2009; Sheng & Mcgregor, 2010). However, some significant differences apparently exist in this semantic area because children with ADHD have fewer semantic-type problems than their peers with DLD (Cartes, 2017).
Redmond (2004) supports measure of lexical diversity, average sentence length and morphosyntactic development were worse in children with DLD in compared to children with ADHD and Typical Development (TD). Although very few studies can be found to date, this line applies to people with ADHD + DLD (Baker & Cantwell, 1992). More recently, Redmond, Ash & Hogan (2015) conducted an investigation to compare the clinical linguistic characteristics of people with ADHD + DLD compared to children with DLD and children with TD. Measures of nonword repetition, sentence recall, and tense marking were collected from 57 seven- to nine-year-old children. The results show that the presence DLD affect the linguistic level of people with double diagnostic. Some research indicates that morphosyntactic level would be conditioned by working memory in the case of DLD but not in ADHD (Stanford & Delage, 2020). In addition, scientific evidence shows that working memory deficits in people with DLD limit their processing capacity to use complex morphosyntax (Delage & Frauenfelder, 2020).
We investigated in-depth the linguistic characteristics of people with the studied double diagnosis and compared them to the profile of the groups with a single diagnosis. The purpose of this research was to know the linguistic profile of children with ADHD + DLD compared to children with ADHD and children with DLD. Our objective is to know the linguistic differences that exist between people with a double diagnosis and with a simple diagnosis (DLD and ADHD) in order to be able to better guide the interventions that are carried out in the clinical context.