Cross-Disciplinary
Dialogue about the Nature of Oral and Written Language Problems in the Context
of Developmental, Academic, and Phenotypic Profiles.
Elaine
R. Silliman, PhD;
Virginia W. Berninger, PhD
Top
Lang Disorders
Vol. 31, No.
1, pp. 6–23
This paper calls for
collaboration between speech language specialists and psychologists
in the assessment of children with language difficulties.
The authors stress the point
that reading and writing are written language abilities. There is "language by ear"
(listening comprehension), "language by mouth" (oral expression),
"language by eye" (reading comprehension) and "language by
hand" (written expression).
Following an interesting discussion about different
kinds of "late talkers" and the causes of this phenomenon, the
authors present profiles of three specific learning disabilities that affect
the acquisition of written language in children with normal development or
normal development except in oral language.
These three disabilities have a common core of possible problems with
executive functions.
a.
Dysgraphia : the child has poor handwriting (poor letter
legibility, difficulty retrieving and producing letter sequences automatically),
difficulty copying letters and words and/or spelling. Spelling can be impaired with good
handwriting or word reading. Dysgraphia disrupts
the writing process.
Children with dysgraphia usually have poor orthographic coding
(storing and processing written words in working memory and analyzing letters
in them), and/or impaired sequential finger movements and/or impaired
orthographic loop (integrating orthographic code with sequences of finger
movements to produce letters and words).
b.
Dyslexia:
the child has difficulties with letter naming and linking letters with
sounds, with rate and/or accuracy in single word, nonword or text decoding, and
with spelling.
Children with dyslexia usually have poor phonological coding (storing spoken
words in working memory and analyzing sounds in them) and/or impaired
orthographic coding and/or impaired phonological loop (integrating written letters
or words with phonological codes for naming them) and/or the orthographic loop.
c.
Oral and written language learning
disability: the child has a
history of delay or difficulties with oral language beginning in kindergarten,
oral and written language problems in school, very poor receptive or expressive
oral language (2 standard deviations below the mean), difficulty with reading
comprehension in the word level (vocabulary), sentence level (sentence
comprehension) or text level (making inferences or understanding the main
ideas) following silent or oral reading.
Children with oral and written language learning disability
usually have poor morphological
coding (storing and processing word parts in spoken or written words –
the word root, suffixes, prefixes) and/or impairment in one language skill or
more (but not in all language skills. The
language skills that may be impaired are
word retrieval, morphology, syntax (storing and processing word order),
drawing inferences from texts or making presuppositions about the text. There can
also be impairments in listening comprehension and in the ability to remember
sentences or texts.
It's
unfortunate, that the tests we have for comprehension – knowledge measure
mainly lexical knowledge and general knowledge.
The narrow CHC abilities language development, communication ability,
listening ability and grammar sensitivity are not usually measured in
intelligence test batteries, nor in other tests we usually use as educational
psychologists. It's important to assess
these abilities, since without assessing them we can "miss" language difficulties
that can explain specific learning difficulties including reading and writing
difficulties.
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