Subject–verb agreement and phonological processing in developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI): a closer look

Abstract

Problems with subject-verb agreement and phonological (processing) skills have been reported to occur in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and in those with developmental dyslexia, but only a few studies have compared such problems in these two groups. Previous studies have claimed a causal relationship between phonological processing deficits and morphosyntactic problems. The following questions were addressed in this study: (1) Are children with developmental dyslexia and SLI comparable in the level of sensitivity to subject-verb agreement, phonological awareness, and non-word repetition? (2) Are children with developmental dyslexia and SLI comparable in their performance profiles on tasks tapping subject-verb agreement, phonological awareness, and non-word repetition? (3) Are deficits in phonological processing skills related to morphosyntactic deficits? Forty-five children (mean age = 8;6 years) with developmental dyslexia, SLI and typically developing children participated. The sensitivity to subject-verb agreement, phonological awareness, and non-word repetition was measured. Both the children with dyslexia and with SLI made more errors than the control children on the subject-verb agreement task, with the children with dyslexia scoring significantly better than the children with SLI. Similarly, the children with SLI and dyslexia both performed more poorly on the phoneme-deletion task than the control group. Both clinical groups performed more poorly on the non-word repetition task than the control children, with the children with dyslexia outperforming the children with SLI. In all three tasks differences in performance profiles were found between the children with developmental dyslexia and SLI. Across all three groups non-word repetition was correlated with morphosyntactic sensitivity. The results show similarities between the performances of children with SLI and dyslexia on tasks tapping subject-verb agreement, phonological awareness, and non-word repetition: they scored more poorly than typically developing children. Qualitative analyses revealed, however, differences in the error patterns on all three tasks. Associations between non-word repetition and sensitivity to subject-verb agreement were found, suggesting that problems with phonological processing impact on morphosyntactic skills.