Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder in comparison with second language learners: A new look at grammatical challenges

The focus of this project is language processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and bilingual children learning Swedish as their second language (L2).

DLD is characterized by difficulty learning a native language and is associated with poor literacy learning and academic development. Children with DLD and children learning Swedish as L2 are similarly challenged by Swedish grammar.

Given the centrality of language to academic success and social-emotional development, it is imperative that clinicians and educators have access to evidence-based recommendations.

Comprehension depends on rapid analysis and integration of different aspects of linguistic information including the sound, word and sentence levels. Studies from other languages have shown that children use the cues provided in the article to retrieve nouns.

We investigate the link between comprehension and production of the challenging Swedish noun phrase construction, which has two genders (en/ett, den /det), in sentences with different grammatical complexity.

We let children produce noun phrases, measure their vocabulary skills and study processing skills in a picture identification task while tracking their eye gaze.

Visual attention and auditory stimuli are closely time-locked; an eye-tracker monitors visual attention using non-invasive technology. More knowledge about how children use the gender cues provided in the article may affect how we support word learning.