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

Abstract

Although developmental dyslexia (DD) and specific language impairment (SLI) are two distinct disorders, DD and SLI children can show comparable difficulties in written and oral skills which may make it difficult the right definition of their disorder. This study explores reading and its relations with some sensitive skills (rapid naming, syntactic comprehension and syntactic production) in a sample of Italian DD-children with/without SLI in order to define possible distinctive patterns for different disorder profiles. Replicating previous results, DD-children with and without SLI show comparable reading performances but differ in that SLI children have a naming and a clitic production deficit in addition to the reading deficit. Typical error patterns emerge for rapid naming by SLI children, and typical compensation strategies for clitic production by SLI and younger DD children. Quantity and quality of correlations between reading and other skills are proportional to the severity of the impairment.

Keywords

• developmental dyslexia (DD)
• specific language impairment (SLI)
• reading
• rapid naming
• syntactic comprehension
• syntactic production