De Groot, B. J. A., Van den Bos, K. P., Van der Meulen,
B.F., Minnaert, A. E. M. G. (2015). Rapid naming and phonemic awareness in
children with reading disabilities and/or specific language impairment:
differentiating processes? Journal of
Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 58. 1538-1548.
Specific language impairment
(SLI) and reading disability (RD) have higher rates of comorbidity than
expected, and it remains unclear how the two disorders are related to one
another. The current study examined whether decoding and recognition processes
during reading can be differentiated in children with SLI with or without a
comorbid RD. Phonemic awareness (PA), the ability to identify and manipulate
speech sounds, is often considered to be a core deficit of RD, although studies
have also observed PA deficits in children with SLI. Rapid automatized naming
(RAN) involves naming arrays of objects, colours, letters, or numbers, and has
been shown to be impaired in RD.
In the present study, groups of children
between 8 and 13 years old with SLI, RD, and comorbid SLI and RD completed RAN
and PA tasks to examine whether performance on both tasks would differ between
groups. The RAN tasks included a letter array and a number array, and the PA
tasks consisted of an elision task (i.e. say “string” without the “r”) and a
substitution task (switch the first sounds in the words “red fish”).
Performance was analyzed using a principal components analysis, which revealed
two components explaining 85% of the variance: a RAN factor and a PA factor.
The analyses revealed that the SLI-only group had low PA scores, the RD-only
group had low scores on both RAN and PA, and the comorbid SLI and RD group had
the most severely impaired performance on all the tasks. A similar pattern of
results was demonstrated with a multivariate analysis of variance.
These findings are consistent
with past research demonstrating RAN and PA impairments in children with RD. Although some literature suggests that PA
impairments may not be severe in children with SLI older than 9 years, the
severe PA impairment observed in the present study’s SLI group may be
associated with the large short-term memory load in the PA substitution task.
The authors suggest that their data best fits a model of RD and SLI in which
the two disorders are similar but distinct phonologically-linked disorders. The
authors emphasize the importance of distinguishing between RD-only, SLI-only,
and comorbid groups in research and in clinical practice, given that additive
impairment effects were observed when SLI and RD occurred comorbidly.
Blogger: Alex Cross; Alex is a student in the combined speech language pathology/Ph.D. program supervised by Drs. Lisa Archibald and Marc Joanisse
Blogger: Alex Cross; Alex is a student in the combined speech language pathology/Ph.D. program supervised by Drs. Lisa Archibald and Marc Joanisse
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