Correlations between oral and written key skills among Italian dyslexic children with and without SLI

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) and Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are two different disorders with several overlaps. The present study explores some language skills that are demanding in both DD and SLI. A group of Italian DD children with and without SLI attending primary school was tested on reading, rapid naming, syntactic comprehension, and syntactic production to identify differences and relations between oral and written performances of differently impaired subjects. DD children with and without SLI showed similar reading problems, with some age-related differences. SLI children showed an additional naming-accuracy deficit and clitic-production deficit, thus confirming clitic production as a reliable clinical marker of SLI. We wonder whether naming accuracy might also be a marker of SLI among DD children. Reading comprehension correlates with written decoding and syntactic comprehension only among younger children, thus suggesting an evolution of reading-comprehension strategies as the age increases. Rapid-naming accuracy predicts decoding accuracy and decoding speed only among skilled elder readers. The quantity and quality of correlations between reading and oral skills are proportional to the extent of the impairment. Some possible impact on language education is briefly discussed.