Reading profiles of children with specific language impairment in comparison to typicaly developing children
Abstract
The study is focused on investigating the reading profiles in both 1st grade and 4th grade children with specific language impairment (SLI). According to the previous research, it tests the assumption that the reading performance of children with SLI is significantly worse compared to the age control group at the level of elementary reading and at the level of reading comprehension.
Based on the theoretical framework, (namely ""The Simple View of Reading"" - Gough & Tunmer 1986), it verifies the hypothesis that the difficulties of the SLI children are most clearly manifested in the area of reading comprehension, and in addition the problems with decoding (reading technique) grow with age. 66 children with SLI and 253 children with typical development of language skills participated in our study. We administered a battery of tests assessing reading skills and language skills which are related to reading development.
The results of our study only showed significant differences in the area of the language comprehension (namely in the test of the listening comprehension) in the 1st grade children. There are significant differences in all tests assessing both reading accuracy and reading comprehension between SLI children and the age control group in the 4th grade.