Slides to accompany RALLI video on SLI and reading, part 1. see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAmLmMEiX4c

1. The traditional view:
separate disorders
SLI Dyslexia
Studied by Studied by
speech and language educators/
therapists psychologists

2. In fact, literacy problems are very
common in children with SLI
 Haynes and Naidoo (1991): Survey of children
attending a special school for SLI
 Only 7 of 82 children were free of reading problems. On
leaving school, with a mean age of 11.5 years, the mean
reading age was 8.5 years, despite intensive intervention.
 Conti-Ramsden, Botting, Simkin, and Knox (2001):
11-year-olds with SLI
 77% were impaired (more than 1.0 standard deviation below
age level) on single word reading, and 98% scored this
poorly on a test of reading comprehension.

3. Reasons for reading difficulties
• Early idea of 'word blindness'
• Common belief that dyslexia is a visual
disorder – problems with reversing b/d etc.
• Little support for this:
• Most visual symptoms are more
consequence than cause
• Just a minority of children affected by
genuine 'visual stress'

4. How do you read an unfamiliar word?
Convert letters into sounds to
achieve pronunciation
CAMEL
/k/+/a/+/m/+/ε/+/l/
“camel”

5. This type of decoding requires ability
to process speech sounds =
phonological ability
• Phonological awareness: identifying
the individual sounds in words
• Matching letters and sounds
• Blending sounds into words
• Phonological memory – keeping
sounds in memory

6. Phonological awareness: harder than
it seems!
We think of words as composed of
individual sounds
p i n

7. In fact, the sounds we hear are
merged in the speech signal
p i n
If you take an auditory signal and try to
chop it up to correspond to the sounds, it
does not work!

8. Acoustic signal corresponding to "heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, hood, who'd”.
Note that there is no clear division between the three sounds in each word, and no
consistency in the signal corresponding to initial ‘h’ or final ‘d’
From:
http://www.cog.jhu.edu/courses/325-f2004/ladefoged/course/contents.html

9. Young children have difficulty hearing that
different words have the same sounds
Adults find this task easy, but many preschoolers find
it hard:
(Show child a puppet): This is ‘Wug’.
He likes things that sound like his name. Which do
you think he will choose?
The cake, the jug, the leaf or the boat?

10. More complex phonological
awareness task
Delete, add or re-arrange sounds in
words, involves memory as well as
identifying sounds, e.g.
"Spoonerisms"
 E.g.,Reverse the initial sounds of
"Mick Jagger" -> "Jick Magger"

11. Children with SLI who are poor at
reading often find spelling especially
hard, and their errors may indicate
phonological problems
 To spell an unfamiliar word need to:
• Break it down into sounds
• Match each sound to a letter
• Write down each letter while
remembering the other sounds

12. Many children with SLI have
problems with phonological
processing linked to reading
problems
Same kind of difficulty is often
seen in children diagnosed with
dyslexia
Catts, H. W. (1993). The relationship between speech-language impairments
and reading disabilities. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 948-958.

13. • May interventions have been designed to
help tackle phonological problems and can
be used for children with SLI
• But important to note that for many
children with SLI, there may also be poor
language comprehension, which will also
be a barrier to literacy – (will be covered in
another video!)
Snowling, M. J., & Hulme, C. (2012). Interventions for children's language and
literacy difficulties. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders,
47(1), 27–34. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-6984.2011.00081.x