Language disorders in children with Developmental Dyslexia

While language skills are generally not assessed in children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD), it is known that 50% of them manifests some of the symptoms that we find in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This is confirmed in this study for Italian: 50% of the children with DD scores 1.5 SD below the mean of their peers with typical development in the production of relative clauses and wh-questions. Thus, some children with DD fail in those tasks in which also children with SLI fail. These findings point to the need of language assessment when children with DD are referred for reading problems.