Reading and Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Case of Greek Students

Abstract

Fluent reading is essential for the comprehension of a text, as well as for the pleasure that a person feels while reading. However, it is a complex process that requires linguistic, cognitive and perceptual abilities. Children with a diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder exhibit deficits in language development that have an impact on their reading skills. The present study investigated the reading performance of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and compared it to that of a group of typically developing (TD) children matched for gender and chronological age. The study took part in Greece and the participants of the study were 62 children, 31 with DLD (M= 91.84 months) and 31 TD (M=92.55 months). In the first task the participants were asked to read aloud a set of fifty pseudowords in a minute and in the second task they were asked to read forty-two sentences and complete them with the word missing, choosing from a set of words within forty minutes (only one of the given words was the right one). The first task assessed the total number of pseudowords the children read (correctly or not) and, also, the total number of the pseudowords they read correctly in one minute. The second task assessed the total number of the correctly completed sentences. The findings of the study showed that the outputs of the DLD group were poorer in all measurements compared to those of their TD peers. Specifically, in the first task the DLD group tended to read less pseudowords in total and less pseudowords correctly than their TD peers. Moreover, in the second task the DLD group completed correctly less sentences than the TD group of participants. All the above indicate the difficulties the DLD group faces in reading tasks and implicate the need for further research.