AA4 dyslexia/SLI
AA4. Relationships between Specific language impairment (SLI) and developmental dyslexia (DD)
Responsable: Liliane Sprenger-Charolles
Member: Soares-Jesel
Other members: Stavrakaki (Aristotles University, Thessaloniki); Talli (Aristotles University, Thessaloniki)
Description
Specific language impairment (SLI) and developmental dyslexia (DD) are often considered to have distinct manifestations. In DD, impaired skills are thought to include word-level reading skills and phonological reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory [STM]. In SLI, morpho-syntactic skills are thought to be impaired. These findings may, however, suffer from methodological problems. Indeed, in DD children usually only word-level reading skills are assessed, whereas in SLI children only morpho-syntactic skills in oral language comprehension or expression are assessed. In contrast with the view that SLI and DD are distinct developmental disorders, some researchers have postulated that they overlap. This view is based on four outcomes. First, both clinical groups are often found to experience similar difficulties in phonological processing (e.g., Kamhi & Catts, 1986; Rispens & Been, 2007). Second, although difficulties with morphosyntax are primarily associated with SLI, in some studies difficulties in this domain are also reported for DD children (e.g., Manis, Keating, & Seidenberg, 2000; Siegel, 2008). Third, SLI children are at risk for reading disorders (e.g., Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002). And fourth, many children who are diagnosed with DD also meet the diagnostic criteria for SLI and vice-versa (e.g., Bishop, McDonald, Bird, & Hayiou-Thomas, 2009). There are two significant concerns with the above-cited studies. The first is that they assessed only a subset of the skills expected to be impaired in SLI or DD, the only exception (to the best of our knowledge) being Bishop et al. (2009). The second is that they were mainly conducted with children who speak English, a language with a very deep orthography. In alphabetic scripts, the level of consistency of the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes influences both typical and atypical reading acquisition (for a review, see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Studies thus, need to be conducted in languages with a shallower orthography than English.
Therefore, in the present studies conducted with Greek- and French-speaking children, we assessed the accuracy of (1) word-level reading, (2) phonemic awareness and phonological STM, and (3) listening and reading comprehension in both children with SLI and children with DD. In addition, we measured processing speed, i.e. the time taken to complete these tasks. The simultaneous assessment of accuracy and speed is crucial when examining word-level reading skills in languages with a shallower orthography than English. Indeed, in such languages, accuracy scores cannot be used to assess the word-level reading skills of older children because they rapidly reach a ceiling level, something that happens even for children with DD (for a review of studies with English, French, and Spanish children, see Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel, Jimenez, & Ziegler, 2011).
Publications
(1) Talli, I., Stavrakaki, S., & Sprenger-Charolles, L. & (2013). Phonological and morpho-syntactic abilities in children with developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment: Evidence from Greek. In S. Stavrakaki, M. Lalioti, & X. Konstantinopoulou (Eds.). Advances in Language Acquisition (pp.444-453). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
(2) Talli, I., Sprenger-Charolles, L. & Stavrakaki, S. (in press). Exploring the overlap between Specific Language Impairment and Developmental Dyslexia: Data from French children. John Benjamins (series: Language Acquisition and Language Disorders. Ed: Harald Clahsen)
