Differences in oral language growth between children with and without literacy difficulties: evidence from early phases of learning to read and spell in Greek

ABSTRACT

The present study examined oral language growth differences in a sample of 256 Greek-speaking children with and without literacy difficulties (LD), during the first two elementary grades. Measures of vocabulary, phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were administered in both grades for the assessment of oral language growth. Reading skills were individually assessed in grade 1 and together with spelling in grade 2. Results showed that PA, MA, and RAN growth differed between children with and without LD. Furthermore, children with spelling difficulties, either single or mixed with reading difficulties, presented a slower MA growth rate than children with single reading difficulties. These findings are informative of the early prognosis and intervention of LD.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) through the Operational Programme “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020” in the context of the project “The role of oral language skills developmental rate οn identification of children with learning difficulties in literacy and οn development of their learning profiles” (MIS 5049016).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Greek has a rather simple syllable structure and its orthography is characterized by a relative imbalance in terms of its feedforward (from letters to sounds) and feedback (from sounds to letters) consistency between phonological segments correspondences with orthographic units. Although its consistency in terms of reading has been calculated to be around 95% and about 80% in terms of spelling (Protopapas & Vlahou, 2009), Greek is a much more consistent orthography than English or French in both reading and spelling direction (see Seymour et al., 2003).

2. F_PA(1, 254) = 467.26, p < .001, η²_ρ = .65, F_MA(1, 254) = 452.29, p < .001, η²_ρ = .64, F_VOC(1, 254) = 128.65, p < .001, η²_ρ = .34, F_RAN(1, 254) = 387.94, p < .001, η²_ρ = .60.

3. F_PA(1, 254) = 99.59, p < .001, η²_ρ = .28, F_MA(1, 254) = 67.06, p < .001, η²_ρ = .21, F_VOC(1, 254) = 36.72, p < .001, η²_ρ = .13, F_RAN(1, 254) = 22.98, p < .001, η²_ρ = .08.

4. F_PA(1, 168) = 290.86, p < .001, η²_ρ = .63, F_MA(1, 168) = 228.43, p < .001, η²_ρ = .58, F_VOC(1, 168) = 58.27, p < .001, η²_ρ = .26, F_RAN(1, 168) = 240.24, p < .001, η²_ρ = .59.

Additional information

Funding

This research is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund-ESF) through the Operational Programme “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020” in the context of the project “The role of oral language skills developmental rate οn identification of children with learning difficulties in literacy and οn development of their learning profiles” (MIS 5049016). [MIS 5049016].