Reading and spelling in language-disordered children—linguistic and metalinguistic prerequisites: Report on a longitudinal study

Abstract

Many language-disordered children experience problems when learning to read and write. This may be so even if the children have normal speech before starting school. On the other hand, some disordered children have no reading and writing problems. Thus, it is important to pay attention not only to the purely linguistic problems children exhibit, but also to other abilities relevant for the acquisition of language and for learning to read and write, such as linguistic awareness, information processing strategies, and short term memory. In this paper we report a study of two matched groups of children: one group of language-disordered children and one group of normally speaking children. Data on the children's phonological, syntactic, and lexical levels and on their linguistic awareness were collected one year before they started school, at the beginning of the first school year, and at the end of the first year. Investigations are also planned for the end of the third and fourth school years. The longitudinal data on linguistic and metalinguistic tasks are analyzed in relation to the children's reading and spelling achievements. The importance of linguistic competence and linguistic awareness for reading and spelling acquisition is discussed, and the possibility of predicting reading and spelling achievements from pre-school data is considered.