Abstract
Specific language impairment (SLI) is a serious disorder of language development which affects many aspects of human life. The process of reading skills acquisition in SLI children is one of the areas in which researchers' attention is often directed towards.
There are many important findings about the relationship between language and reading skills presented in this chapter. We have also been interested in the diagnostics of SLI, because early identification of this disorder is crucial for the initiation of the appropriate intervention strategies.
In fact, speech problems are not obvious in all cases, and the difficulties of these children are often only represented in the areas of reading acquisition and reading comprehension respectively. This fact leads us to place emphasis on the diagnostics of the language domains, which played an important role in the process of sampling in our study.
The aim of our study is the deep analysis of both reading components - decoding and reading comprehension. We consider both of these aspects as a complex skill, and therefore we decided to use the complex test battery which allows for the assessing of partial aspects of these skills.
Based on the findings of the most recent studies we expected that SLI children would perform worse than their peers in all reading tasks, and that their problems would manifest in both aspects of reading, but more in the area of reading comprehension. Our findings correspond with these ideas which are briefly mentioned above only partially.