Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment: distinct syntactic profiles?

Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment: distinct syntactic profiles? Clin Linguist Phon. 2018 May 18;:1-28 Authors: Delage H, Durrleman S Abstract Recent work exploring syntax in developmental dyslexia (DD) has identified morphosyntactic deficits, striking parallelisms between children with DD and specific language impairment (SLI). The question remains open if the underlying causes for such deficits are related to difficulties in phonology, which is affected in DD, or to working memory, as has been previously reported for SLI. We focus on the production of third person accusative clitic pronouns (ACC3) and of homophonous definite determiners in French-speaking children with DD and SLI as well as typically developing (TD) controls. If syntactic complexity modulates performance of DD children, as has already been shown for SLI, we predict children with DD to perform significantly worse on ACC3 compared to definite determiners, which are homophonous but syntactically simpler. In addition, if impairment in ACC3 stems from phonology or working memory difficulties, we expect ACC3 performance in both clinical groups to relate to performance on non-word repetition or forward/backward digit spans. We studied 2 groups of 21 children and adolescents, with DD and SLI (7-15 years) and age-matched TD controls. Results reveal significant weaknesses with ACC3 in DD and SLI groups compared to TD controls, but no difficulty for homo...
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Clin Linguist Phon Source Type: research