Seventeen children (ages 5-7) with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to age-matched (AM) and language-matched (LM) groups on measures of metalinguistic skill. SLI children's performance was worse than AM peers and indistinguishable from younger LM children, suggesting that morphological awareness is more closely allied to oral…

A multisensory structured language (MSL) approach was utilized with two groups of at-risk high school students (n=63), taught in either English and Spanish (MSL/ES) or Spanish only. Foreign language aptitude improved for both groups and native language skills for the MSL/ES group. A group receiving traditional foreign language instruction showed…

The syntactic development of preschoolers (n=22) who later became disabled readers was compared to that of similar children who became normal readers. Expressive and receptive syntactic abilities were examined from age 30 to 60 months. The dyslexic group was poorer on all measures until age five, when both groups exhibited similar syntactic…

Described are the history of the study of language disabilities, briefly outlining the work of Samuel Orton, Judson Herrick, Adolph Meyer, and Paul Schilder; Lauretta Bender's development of the Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test; and the basic principles of language disorders, including familial patterns, maturation lag, plasticity, and nonfixated…

This study found that 30 children with reading disability (RD) performed more poorly than 30 children with normal reading achievement on tasks of serial rapid naming, verbal fluency, letter-based word retrieval, and articulatory speed. RD children had significantly longer reaction times and production durations on the serial naming task. Findings…

This study compared (1) performance on language skills and phonological process measures by 41 kindergarten children with speech/language impairments, and (2) their reading ability in first grade. Children with semantic-syntactic language deficits exhibited more difficulties in reading than did children with articulation impairments. Phonological…

Normal students (N=65) in fourth, sixth, and eighth grades were compared to 17 learning-disabled ninth graders on learning derivational morphology and spelling derived forms. Disabled students' knowledge of derivational morphology was equivalent to that of normal sixth graders, but spelling of derived forms was equivalent to that of fourth…

A theoretical framework is presented for understanding difficulties in foreign language learning, based upon a linguistic coding model that hypothesizes deficits in phonological, syntactic, and semantic information processing. Incidence of linguistic coding problems in 22 college-enrolled or college-bound students who petitioned to have the…

This literature-based review examines the relationship between the acquisition of segmental awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy. Cited studies show that the segmental analysis ability of most dyslexics is very poor and suggest one factor may be related to the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity…

Genetic research has shown that dyslexia is familial, substantially heritable, and heterogeneous in its genetic mechanisms. Evidence also supports the view that the primary symptom in dyslexia is a deficit in the phonological coding of written language, a symptom that appears to be heritable. (Author/JDD)

This analysis of 17,602 frequently used words found that 616 orthographic rimes occurred in rime families as building blocks of almost all the 43,041 word syllables. Of these, 436 were both regular and consistent in pronunciation, and only 86 had less than a 90 percent level of consistency. Results suggest the usefulness of rime units for teaching…

The paper discusses problems with traditional definitions of dyslexia and reviews research that suggests a more comprehensive definition, viewing dyslexia as a developmental language disorder that involves a deficit in phonological processing. The disorder is seen as manifesting itself in various phonological difficulties as well as in a specific…

Family histories of 12 hyperlexic (precocious word reading with little comprehension often associated with autism) children (5-10 years old) were investigated. Results suggested familial tendencies to disorders of language, reading, writing, and spelling in male relatives, along with a high incidence of nonright-handedness. (Author/DB)

An auditory rhyme detection task was employed to examine orthographic code development in 27 reading-disabled and 27 normally achieving children (ages 7-11 years). It was concluded that children with a reading disability have a lessened ability to automatically access and make available stored lexical information relating to orthography.…

A model for understanding reading, containing three components (orthographic/phonological, morphological, and sentence and paragraph comprehension) was tested with 298 preadolescent readers. Maximum likelihood analyses showed that the model provides a good fit for the grade 4 data, a reasonable fit for grade 5, but was less unambiguous for grade…