Distinguishing DD from SLI. Language profiles of Italian dyslexic children with and without specific language impairment

Casani, Emanuele

doi:10.25267/pragmalinguistica.2020.iextra2.03

Cited by 2 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(17 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As expected, DD-children were significantly less accurate and slower in reading than TD children after controlling for decoding errors, irrespective of their age. The two groups obtained similar syntactic comprehension and production results, irrespective of their age (for qualitative response analyses of syntactic tests on a wider sample including the present participants, see Casani, 2020a , b ), thus suggesting that DD does not directly affect oral morphosyntactic and syntactic skills in primary school.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…The analyses of individual performances confirmed an impairment in both the lexical and sublexical route in 3 out of 4 children with language disorders. Interestingly, both Traficante et al (2017) through the word lists, and Casani (2019) through text reading, found 11 and 2 cases of poor readers, respectively, who had not been detected through standard measures. These data encourage a fine-grained decoding error analysis even in shallow-orthography languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…This outcome, however, stresses the importance of a careful analysis of linguistic profiles of DD children, even in a longitudinal perspective, to reveal possible problems that might emerge in particular developmental steps. A qualitative analysis of different language structures is also advisable, to reveal possible strategies that might be associated with specific developmental conditions ( Casani, 2020b ). In this regard, third-person direct object clitic pronouns are deemed very sensitive to detect language difficulties (e.g., Tuller et al, 2011 ; Varlokosta et al, 2016 ; Casani, 2020c ), even in DD (e.g., Guasti, 2013 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their pilot study found six different types of DD in 52 Italian poor readers compared to 210 typical readers from the second to the fifth grade of primary school, thus showing that it is possible to discriminate several types of reading impairments due to selective segments of the dual-route model of reading even in a shallow-orthography language like Italian. Casani (2019) applied a coding scheme based on Friedmann and Coltheart (2018) to the text reading ( Cornoldi and Colpo, 2011 ) of 21 children with DD, 4 of which with a developmental language disorder, compared to 32 typically developing children from the first to the second grade. That study detected 11 different error types.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A total of 53 Italian monolingual children in primary school were initially tested (for the results of the whole sample, see Casani, 2020a , b ). They were recruited in primary schools in the Center and South of Italy.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Morphosyntactic Skills Influence the Written Decoding Accuracy of Italian Children With and Without Developmental Dyslexia

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Some types of developmental dyslexia (DD) are associated with morphology. Deep DD leads to morphological and semantic errors, and possible comorbidity with syntactic deficits; phonological-output-buffer DD causes problems in decoding longer morphologically complex words. In addition, cross-linguistic studies highlight the effects of morphological awareness on reading accuracy and fluency. The role of morphosyntactic abilities on reading is, however, not clear. This study explores the influence of morphosyntactic competence on reading in Italian children with and without DD. A total of 14 children with DD and 28 with Typical Development (TD) attending the Italian primary school were tested on written decoding, syntactic comprehension of different grammatical structures, and syntactic production of direct object clitic pronouns. DD children were significantly less accurate and slower in reading than TD children. Syntactic skills of the two groups did not differ significantly, but some differences in their acquisitional pace emerged. Syntactic comprehension and production of direct-object-clitic pronouns predicted reading accuracy standard scores, thus suggesting that morphosyntactic abilities, beyond clitics’ weak phonological status, affect decoding accuracy. Decoding accuracy was influenced by reading errors related to morphology (morphological, semantic, and phonological-output-buffer errors). Decoding speed was a specific weakness of DD children and was rather affected by multi-letter combinations. Consistent with a dual-route approach to orthographic processing, we argue that accuracy depends on fine-grained decoding strategies maximizing the precise ordering of letters, thus it is more sensitive to morphosyntactic skills. Morphological reading errors were associated with phonologically weak (determiners, clitic pronouns, and prepositions) and salient words (verbs). This suggests that the decoding of function words and morphologically complex words is particularly demanding and related to both phonological and morphosyntactic skills. Age had a negative predictive effect on semantic errors, compatible with the gradual acquisition of lexical decoding strategies, which seemed to be slowed down by DD. We conclude that oral morphosyntactic skills play a role in reading accuracy in the Italian shallow orthography for both DD and TD children. It is then advisable to assess children’s linguistic profile during DD diagnoses to establish whether some reading errors are related to morphosyntactic weakness. In this case, ad hoc morphosyntactic training might support reading accuracy.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%