Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Morphosyntax in Child Language Disorders

This chapter discusses morphosyntactic abilities across different languages in children diagnosed with a range of developmental disorders. These include Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), previously also referred to as Specific Language Impairment (SLI); Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); hearing impairment; and Down Syndrome (DS), where language and communication are the primary or the secondary disorder. We review studies published in the last decade (2010–2022), to complement a thorough review by Crago et al. (2008) in the previous edition of The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics as well as the seminal work by Leonard (2014, 2022), which compared manifestations of language disorders across different languages. Recently, there has been an increase in research on typical and atypical language development in monolingual and multilingual children in languages beyond English. While we are aware of the importance of researching bi/multilingual language acquisition (see Chapter 17 of the current volume), in the current chapter we focus on research comparing the performance of monolingual, typically developing children (TD), and those with language disorders. Specifically, we include studies employing a Sentence Repetition (SRep) task. This task is highly effective in teasing apart typical and atypical language development (Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001), and one that has been shown to tap into children's knowledge of morphosyntax. Error patterns in SRep tasks are compared across typologically similar and different languages with the ultimate aim of shedding light on commonalities and differences in the manifestation of language disorder across languages. We hope that this will assist in synthesizing more nuanced theories of language acquisition, provide a better understanding of language disorder, and help build better diagnostic tools and effective treatment plans targeting language deficits.