SLI and reading: 1. decoding

The traditional view: separate disorders

SLI Dyslexia

Studied byspeech and language

therapists

Studied byeducators/

psychologists

In fact, literacy problems are very common in children with SLI

Haynes and Naidoo (1991): Survey of children attending a special school for SLI Only 7 of 82 children were free of reading problems. On

leaving school, with a mean age of 11.5 years, the mean reading age was 8.5 years, despite intensive intervention.

Conti-Ramsden, Botting, Simkin, and Knox (2001): 11-year-olds with SLI 77% were impaired (more than 1.0 standard deviation below

age level) on single word reading, and 98% scored this poorly on a test of reading comprehension.

Reasons for reading difficulties

• Early idea of 'word blindness'• Common belief that dyslexia is a visual

disorder – problems with reversing b/d etc.• Little support for this:

• Most visual symptoms are more consequence than cause

• Just a minority of children affected by genuine 'visual stress'

How do you read an unfamiliar word?

Convert letters into sounds to achieve pronunciation

/k/+/a/+/m/+//+/l/

CAMEL

“camel”

This type of decoding requires ability to process speech sounds =

phonological ability

• Phonological awareness: identifying the individual sounds in words

• Matching letters and sounds• Blending sounds into words• Phonological memory – keeping

sounds in memory

Phonological awareness: harder than it seems!

We think of words as composed of individual sounds

p i n

In fact, the sounds we hear are merged in the speech signal

p i n

If you take an auditory signal and try to chop it up to correspond to the sounds, it does not work!

From:http://www.cog.jhu.edu/courses/325-f2004/ladefoged/course/contents.html

Acoustic signal corresponding to "heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, hood, who'd”.Note that there is no clear division between the three sounds in each word, and no consistency in the signal corresponding to initial ‘h’ or final ‘d’

Young children have difficulty hearing that different words have the same sounds

Adults find this task easy, but many preschoolers find it hard:(Show child a puppet): This is ‘Wug’. He likes things that sound like his name. Which do you think he will choose?The cake, the jug, the leaf or the boat?

More complex phonological awareness task

Delete, add or re-arrange sounds in words, involves memory as well as identifying sounds, e.g.

"Spoonerisms"E.g., Reverse the initial sounds of

"Mick Jagger" -> "Jick Magger"

Children with SLI who are poor at reading often find spelling especially hard, and their errors may indicate phonological problems

To spell an unfamiliar word need to:• Break it down into sounds• Match each sound to a letter• Write down each letter while

remembering the other sounds

Many children with SLI haveproblems with phonological processing linked to reading problems

Same kind of difficulty is often seen in children diagnosed with dyslexia

Catts, H. W. (1993). The relationship between speech-language impairments and reading disabilities. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 948-958.

Snowling, M. J., & Hulme, C. (2012). Interventions for children's language and literacy difficulties. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 47(1), 27–34. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-6984.2011.00081.x

• May interventions have been designed to help tackle phonological problems and can be used for children with SLI

• But important to note that for many children with SLI, there may also be poor language comprehension, which will also be a barrier to literacy – (will be covered in another video!)