Specific language impairment (SLI) and reading development in early school years

Abstract

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a condition that affects children’s emerging language skills. Many different language skills can be affected in SLI, but not all individuals with SLI have the same set of difficulties. As a result, SLI is a highly heterogeneous condition. The ability to read and understand written text is a higher function of language, which has its base on the language skills that may be affected by SLI. Previous studies suggest that children with SLI are at risk of developing literacy difficulties at school age. To test this hypothesis a longitudinal follow-up study of SLI was performed in an urban city in Finland. Forty-three children diagnosed with SLI completed tests for lexical and rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading ability (technical reading and reading comprehension). Children were tested in schools in years one to three, at the end of each school year. At the age of 10 (year 3) children with SLI had relatively weak technical reading abilities with somewhat stronger reading comprehension abilities and concomitant lexical retrieval impairments, but age-appropriate RAN abilities. These findings lend further support to the view that SLI imposes a considerable risk in learning to read. Even in an orthographically highly transparent language, such as Finnish, technical reading skills often seem to remain poor. In this study, the findings on the development of lexical retrieval abilities support the Matthew-effect model in reading development (Stanovich, 1986), while the results of the development of RAN abilities support the developmental lag theory (Stanovich et al., 1988). All in all, these children with SLI had great difficulties in learning to read, which places them at a serious risk of developing concomitant learning problems.