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We examined the manifestation of dyslexia in a cross-linguistic study contrasting English and Greek children with dyslexia compared to chronological age and reading-level control groups on reading accuracy and fluency, phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, orthographic choice, and spelling. Materials were carefully matched across languages in item properties and structure. English children with dyslexia were more impaired on reading accuracy and phoneme deletion but not on reading fluency, memory, naming, or orthographic choice. No differences in impairment were observed between words and pseudowords across languages. Orthographic tests targeted specific morphemes to examine the accessibility of functionally distinct word parts across languages. There were no differences in prefix and stem orthographic choice, but English children were less successful in spelling inflectional suffixes despite greater morphological richness in Greek, highlighting the need for additional considerations beyond grain size in cross-linguistic work.

We investigated the spelling of derivational and inflectional suffixes by 10-13-year-old Greek children. Twenty children with dyslexia (DYS), 20 spelling-level-matched (SA) and 20 age-matched (CA) children spelled adjectives, nouns, and verbs in dictated word pairs and sentences. Children spelled nouns and verbs more accurately than adjectives and inflections more accurately than derivational suffixes. DYS children performed worse than CA in all cases and worse than SA in verb inflections, but similar to SA in all the remaining cases, consistent with a delayed rather than deviant performance pattern. Qualitative analysis showed that uncommon vowel graphemes were often replaced by more common patterns. Children with dyslexia may have weaknesses in grasping morphological information and/or in applying this knowledge to spell word suffixes.

We conducted a longitudinal study examining the role of phonemic awareness, phonological processing, and grammatical skills in the development of reading and spelling abilities in Greek. A battery of cognitive, linguistic, and literacy tasks was administered to 131 primary school children (65 7-year-olds and 66 9-year-olds) and was repeated in the following year (8- and 10-year-olds, respectively). Phoneme awareness, speech rate, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were concurrent predictors of reading rate at Time 1 (T1), and speech rate was a longitudinal predictor of reading rate at Time 2 (T2) when reading at T1 was controlled. The predictors of spelling differed from those of reading; phoneme awareness and speech rate predicted concurrent attainments at T1, and phoneme awareness was a robust longitudinal predictor. Despite the differences in the degree of transparency between the Greek and English orthographies, phoneme awareness predicts variations in learning to read and spell in both languages.

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.), with mean ages of 5;6, 8;7, 10;10 and 13;9. The tasks tap comprehension and production of functional aspects of intonation, in four communicative areas: "Chunking" (i.e. prosodic phrasing), "Affect," "Interaction" and "Focus." Results indicate that there is considerable variability among children within each age band on most tasks. The ability to produce intonation functionally is largely established in five-year-olds, though some specific functional contrasts are not mastered until C.A. 8;7. Aspects of intonation comprehension continue to develop up to C.A. 10;10, correlating with measures of expressive and receptive language development.

This article presents a longitudinal study of the early literacy development of 47 children with speech difficulties from ages 4 to 7 years. Of these children, 19 with specific speech difficulties were compared with 19 children with speech and language difficulties and 19 normally developing controls. The risk of literacy difficulties was greater in the group with speech and language difficulties, and these children displayed deficits in phoneme awareness at 6 years. In contrast, the literacy development of children with isolated speech problems was not significantly different from that of controls. A path analysis relating early speech, language, and literacy skills indicated that preschool language ability was a unique predictor of phoneme awareness at 5;8 (years; months), which, together with early reading skill, predicted literacy outcome at 6;9. Once the effects of phoneme awareness were controlled, neither speech perception nor speech production processes predicted variation in literacy skills. However, it is noteworthy that children with persisting speech difficulties at 6;9 were particularly vulnerable to deficits in reading-related processes.KEY WORDS: phonological difficulties, phoneme awareness, reading, speech production, language impairment

Two groups of adolescents with language impairment (n=87) were compared with 20 adolescents with dyslexia, 19 aged-matched controls, and 18 younger typical children. Adolescents with dyslexia only performed as well as those with persistent oral language impairments and younger controls in reading and spelling, however, their reading comprehension was better. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

The development of literacy skills was studied in 20 dyslexic children (7 years 7 months to 12 years 7 months). At Time 1, the dyslexic children performed worse on tests of reading, spelling, and phonological processing than chronological age-matched normal readers, but their performance was qualitatively similar to that of younger reading age-matched controls. The dyslexic children made poor progress over the following 2 years and, in comparison with reading age controls at Time 2, showed specific difficulties in nonword reading and repetition and made more dysphonetic spelling errors. The authors argue that this typical dyslexic profile becomes more defined with development and provides support for the theory that phonological deficits in dyslexia compromise the development of reading skills.

Background. Children with speech difficulties may have associated educational problems. This paper reports a study examining the educational attainment of children at Key Stage I of the National Curriculum who had previously been identified with a speech difficulty Aims. (I) To examine the educational attainment at Key Stage I of children diagnosed with speech difficulties two/three years prior to the present study. (2) To compare the Key Stage I assessment results of children whose speech problems had resolved at the time of assessment with those whose problems persisted Sample(s). Data were available from 39 children who had an earlier diagnosis of speech difficulties at age ⅘ (from an original cohort of 47) at the age of 7. A control group of 35 children identified and matched at preschool on age. nonverbal ability and gender provided comparative data. Methods. Results of Statutory Assessment Tests (SATs) in reading. reading comprehension. spelling, writing and maths, administered to children at the end of Year 2 of school were analysed. Performance across the two groups was compared. Performance was also compared to published statistics on national levels of attainment. Results. Children with a history of speech difficulties performed less well than controls on reading. spelling and maths. However, children whose speech problems had resolved by the time of assessment performed no differently to controls. Children with persisting speech problems performed less well than controls on tests of literacy and maths. Spelling performance was a particular area of difficulty for children with persisting speech problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]