Reading Disabilities Among Hebrew-speaking Children in Upper Elementary Grades: The Role of Phonological and Nonphonological Language Skills

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine the contribution of phonological and nonphonological language skills to reading among Hebrew-speaking children with and without reading disabilities (RD) aged 10–13. We expected that the performance of children with RD would be significantly poorer in all of the language processes compared with those of chronological age-matched children with no RD. Also, we expected that nonphonological language skills would contribute unique variance to reading level. The results showed that the most marked predictor for all reading measures was the phonological awareness measure. However, nonphonological language skills also showed a significant contribution to variance in accuracy and rate of reading real words but not to variance in pseudoword reading. The discussion highlights how investigating different orthographic systems can deepen our understanding of the role of the different language processes at play in reading. Our results further stress the importance of using multi-componential reading measures (i.e., pseudowords, real words and reading rate) when analyzing the relationship between reading and language skills.