Reading and Spelling Disabilities in Children with and Without a History of Early Language Delay: A Neuropsychological and Linguistic Study

Abstract

Language delay is a frequent antecedent of literacy problems, and both may be linked to phonological impairment. Studies on developmental dyslexia have led to contradictory results due to the heterogeneity of the pathological samples. The present study investigated whether Italian children with dyslexia showed selective phonological processing deficits or more widespread linguistic impairment and whether these deficits were associated with previous language delay. We chose 46 children with specific reading deficits and divided them into two groups based on whether they had language delay (LD) or not (NoLD). LD and NoLD children showed similar, severe deficits in reading and spelling decoding, but only LD children showed a moderate impairment in reading comprehension. LD children were more impaired in phonological working memory and phonological fluency, as well as in semantic fluency, grammatical comprehension, and verbal IQ. These findings indicate the presence of a moderate but widespread linguistic deficit (not limited to phonological processing) in a subset of dyslexic children with previous language delay that does not generalize to all children with reading difficulties.

Keywords:

• Dyslexia
• Phonological processing
• Early language delay

This study was supported by a grant from the Department of Health. At the time of the study, Anna Chilosi (now at the IRCCS Stella Maris of Pisa) was Director of the “Centro Regionale per le Disabilità Linguistiche e Cognitive” (Regional Center for Linguistic and Cognitive Disabilities) in Bologna. The Center is a nonprofit state organization of the Italian Public Health System. Pierluigi Zoccolotti is member of the Marie Curie Research and Training Network: Language and Brain (RTN-lab), funded by the European Commission (MRTN-CT-2004-512141) as part of its “Sixth Framework Program.”

We thank A. Orsini for kindly providing means and standard deviations of the Italian normative data of the Corsi test. We also thank Mrs. Claire Montagna for kindly polishing the English of the present paper.