Abstract
The Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a delay in language skills that cannot be explained by sensory or cognitive difficulties. Currently, there are limited studies that analyze how socioeconomic, educational, and family variables influence reading skills of Spanish-speaking children with DLD at school. This study identifies how oral language performance and reading skills of children with DLD are linked to socioeconomic, educational, and family factors. Oral language, phonological awareness and reading abilities were assessed in a sample of 15 children diagnosed with DLD and their controls by age and gender. Children's parents answered a Likert scale questionnaire inquiring about some aspects related to the family's socioeconomic status, mothers' educational level, family support, academic average, and repetition of school years of the participants. The results indicate that children with DLD have a lower performance in phonological awareness tasks as well as in reading abilities. There is also a direct relationship between their performance in language and reading skills and variables as mother's educational level and family support. Likewise, children in the sample have a lower academic average as well as a higher school year repetition rate interfering in their academic life. Educational implications of these findings and a discussion on possible causality axes and protective factors that contributes to support this population are presented.
Highlights
The Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting the development of communicative skills in children who demonstrate normal non-verbal intelligence and do not present hearing, visual or environmental impairments which explains the disorder (Bishop and Hayiou-Thomas, 2008)
The aim of this study is to identify how oral language difficulties and reading skills in children with DLD are linked to socioeconomic, educational, and family factors; thereby, this research contributes to the understanding of DLD in Spanish, considering that Spanish differs from other languages such as English in terms of the transparency on its spelling which has repercussions on the difficulties that children may face during their learning processes
Oral language skills are crucial in the subsequent development of reading
Summary
The Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting the development of communicative skills in children who demonstrate normal non-verbal intelligence and do not present hearing, visual or environmental impairments which explains the disorder (Bishop and Hayiou-Thomas, 2008). In Colombia there are neither epidemiological data of the incidence of DLD in children nor on the access of these children to therapeutic or educational services. DLD affects several linguistic levels and processes, such as morphosyntax (Conti-Ramsden et al, 2001), phonological processing (Montgomery and Windsor, 2007; Claessen et al, 2013; Aguilar-Mediavilla et al, 2014), reading (Bishop and Snowling, 2004; Pennington and Bishop, 2009) and writing (Graham et al, 2020), as well as cognitive skills as processing speed (Miller et al, 2001), auditory attention (Ebert et al, 2019), executive functioning (Pauls and Archibald, 2016), and working memory (Ghandour et al, 2018). There are alterations related to behavior and emotional regulation transcending past childhood (Conti-Ramsden et al, 2019)
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