Morphosyntactic challenges for Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder in comparison with L1 and L2 peers

This article provides an overview of the research on morpho-syntactic challenges
in Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD), compared
with typically developing (TD) children learning Swedish as their first and
second language (L1/L2). Children with DLD show vulnerabilities with verb finiteness,
the possessive construction, and noun phrase gender agreement, as well
as word-order in non-subject initiated sentences. For L2-learners, word order and
the noun phrase gender agreement present main challenges. We discuss to what
extent these morpho-syntactic weaknesses can be explained by different theoretical
accounts and identify future research needs. Surface similarities between
groups may originate from different factors and more knowledge is needed to inform educational and clinical practice for both of these groups of children.