Early signs of dyslexia from the speech and language processing of children

Abstract

The Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia project (JLD) has followed the development of 200 children from birth until 10 years of age. Half the children are from families in which at least one of the parents has dyslexia, thus the child has a high risk of becoming dyslexic, and half have no such risk. Here the main findings of four studies in linguistics from the JLD project are reviewed. The speech processing skills were studied in 6, 18, 24 and 30-month-old children. The findings show that early signs of dyslexia can be detected in speech processing both phonologically and morphosyntactically. These precursors can be seen in perception or production of duration, in the prosody and phonotactics of word production attempts and word structures, as well as in the complexity of morphosyntactic features of expressions. This information can be useful in practice to provide early and appropriate assistance for those children who most likely will face difficulties in learning to read and write at school.

Keywords:

• Dyslexia
• reading
• early language development
• phonological processing
• morphosyntactic processing

Notes

1 The CVCV structures form prototypical Finnish words. Here the same subscript indicates that the phonemes are exactly the same. In cases where there is no subscript the phonemes are different. Thus, C₁V₁C₁V₁ refers to a structure with complete harmony, as in the word pupu “bunny”. C₁VC₁V refers to a form with consonant harmony, as in the word mummo “granny”. CV₁CV₁ refers to a form with vowel harmony, as in the word vene “boat”. The complex C₁V₁ C₂V₂ refers to a structure which has no harmony, as in the word kuppi “cup”.

2 The size of lexicon of these two children was 103 and 241. Despite large lexicons, these children produced phonotactically restricted word forms.