Rapid Naming, Reading, Comprehension and Syntactic Production by Italian Dyslexic Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment

Slowness in rapid naming of visual stimuli is a typical problem of children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). It is longitudinally related to written decoding, rather than to written comprehension. Comprehension and production of syntactically complex structures are also problematic for both SLI and DD children. The present study explores these skills and their relations with reading in a sample of Italian primary-school children. DD children with and without SLI reveal comparable reading problems but differ in that SLI children have a naming-accuracy deficit in addition to the reading deficit. These results are interpretable in light of the double deficit hypothesis. SLI children are also significantly less accurate in the production of direct object clitic pronouns, thus confirming clitic omission as a reliable clinical marker of SLI. The correlation between rapid naming and written decoding is present only in the TD group, where naming accuracy and naming speed are significant predictors of decoding speed. The quantity and quality of relations between reading and other skills are proportional to the severity of the impairment.