Reading and writing as aspects of language

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.