A methodological protocol for multimodal profiling of conversational abilities in mandarin-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

IntroductionDevelopmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition that affects both the structural and pragmatic aspects of language. Conversational abilities—including topic initiation, maintenance, repair, turn-taking, and the integration of non-verbal behaviors—are essential for social communication and peer relationships. While a substantial body of research has described conversational difficulties in DLD among English-speaking populations, there is limited evidence on how these impairments manifest in Mandarin-speaking children. There is a critical need for culturally adapted assessment approaches; thus, this protocol primarily aims to evaluate the feasibility of a multimodal framework tailored specifically to the Mandarin-speaking context.MethodsThis protocol describes an age-stratified cross-sectional observational study with two phases. In Phase 1, an adapted multimodal profiling framework will be developed and piloted through semi-structured free conversation and role-play tasks, recorded with audio–video equipment. Transcription will follow Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) conventions within European Distributed Corpora (EUDICO) Linguistic Annotator (ELAN), with word segmentation supported by Jieba and manual correction. Annotation tiers will capture utterance-level features, communicative acts (Inventory of Communicative Acts-Abridged [INCA-A]), repairs, turn-taking, and gesture–speech alignment (stroke apex ±500 ms). Feasibility (session completion, recording length, and utterance yield) and reliability (Cohen’s κ, ICC, and drift checks) will be evaluated to refine the coding manual. In Phase 2, the finalized protocol will be applied to 90 children with DLD and 90 typically developing (TD) peers (aged 4–6, matched for age and sex). Data analysis will quantify primary outcome measures (topic maintenance ratio, successful repair rate, gesture–speech synchrony index) and secondary outcome measures (lexical diversity, initiation–maintenance balance, and turn-taking productivity), with exploratory analyses of demographic and home-environment moderators.DiscussionThis protocol advances methodological research by providing a transparent and reproducible framework for multimodal profiling of pragmatic language in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. Its strengths include multimodal data integration and explicit feasibility benchmarks. Limitations include the cross-sectional design and a modest sample size. Future research may extend the protocol to longitudinal studies, contributing to the establishment of standardized procedural benchmarks and improved data comparability within this specific linguistic environment.