The role of the speech-language pathologist in improving decoding skills.

In this article, we consider the processes and knowledge involved in decoding and present some instructional guidelines and suggestions for teaching students the skills necessary for proficient and fluent word reading. The roles and responsibilities of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are also considered. It may have been enough several years ago for SLPs to focus solely on early literacy skills and phonological awareness. This is not the case today. SLPs not only need to collaborate with teachers to develop a comprehensive approach to literacy, but also should be providing direct, explicit instruction of decoding skills for students with language and learning disabilities.

The relationship between language and reading. Preliminary results from a longitudinal investigation.

This longitudinal study investigated the relationship between language and reading from three perspectives. First, we examined the reading and writing outcomes of children identified with spoken language impairments (LIs). Second, the early language abilities of children identified as poor readers were investigated. Finally, reading and language abilities were treated as continuous variables and the developmental relationship between them was studied. In general, the results indicated that language abilities (both phonological processing and oral language) significantly contributed to achievement in the early stages of reading (2nd grade) and had an even stronger effect as children acquired greater reading proficiency (4th grade).

The relationship between speech-language impairments and reading disabilities.

A group of children with speech-language impairments was identified in kindergarten and given a battery of speech-language tests and measures of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming. Subjects were followed in first and second grades and administered tests of written word recognition and reading comprehension. The children with speech-language impairments were found to perform less well on reading tests than a nonimpaired comparison group. Subjects' performance on standardized measures of language ability in kindergarten was observed to be closely related to reading outcome, especially reading comprehension. Measures of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, on the other hand, were found to be the best predictors of written word recognition. The implications of these findings for the early identification and remediation of reading disabilities are discussed.

Early identification of dyslexia: Evidence from a follow-up study of speech-language impaired children.

A group of speech-language impaired children was administered a battery of standardized language tests and measures of phonological processing in kindergarten. Performance on these language measures was then compared to reading ability in first grade. Results indicated that children with semantic-syntactic language deficits had more difficulties in reading than did children with primarily speech articulation impairments. In addition, phonological processing measures were found to be good predictors of reading achievement. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the early identification of developmental dyslexia.

Explaining speech production deficits in poor readers.

The purpose of the present study was to further examine speech production abilities of young poor readers. Fourteen poor readers and 14 age-matched nondisabled subjects were taught to produce four novel, multisyllabic nonsense words. A recognition task was part of the training procedure. Retention of the words was also probed. The poor readers took significantly longer than the nondisabled children to produce three of the four words. The recognition data indicated that encoding limitations, rather than speech production limitations, were primarily responsible for the longer acquisition times. Speech production deficiencies seemed to account for only a small portion of the difficulty the poor readers experienced learning the novel words. The data are consistent with previous research that has documented encoding limitations in poor readers.

Speech production deficits in developmental dyslexia.

In this study, dyslexic and normal subjects rapidly repeated a series of phonologically complex and simple phrases. Dyslexic subjects repeated the phrases at a significantly slower rate and, in the complex condition, made significantly more errors. An examination of errors suggested that dyslexics may have difficulties in the planning stage of speech production. Findings are discussed in reference to other phonological deficits and oral reading problems in dyslexia.

Defining dyslexia as a developmental language disorder.

Despite recent developments in research and theory, investigators and practitioners continue to rely on rather traditional definitions of dyslexia. This paper discusses some of the problems with traditional definitions and reviews a rapidly growing body of research that suggests a more comprehensive definition. According to this definition, dyslexia is a developmental language disorder that involves a deficit(s) in phonological processing. This disorder manifests itself in various phonological difficulties as well as a specific reading disability.

Phonological and spatial processing abilities in language- and reading-impaired children.

In the present study, we further examined (see Kamhi & Catts, 1986) the phonological processing abilities of language-impaired (LI) and reading-impaired (RI) children. We also evaluated these children's ability to process spatial information. Subjects were 10 LI, 10 RI, and 10 normal children between the ages of 6:8 and 8:10 years. Each subject was administered eight tasks: four word repetition tasks (monosyllabic, monosyllabic presented in noise, three-item, and multisyllabic), rapid naming, syllable segmentation, paper folding, and form completion. The normal children performed significantly better than both the LI and RI children on all but two tasks: syllable segmentation and repeating words presented in noise. The LI and RI children performed comparably on every task with the exception of the multisyllabic word repetition task. These findings were consistent with those from our previous study (Kamhi & Catts, 1986). The similarities and differences between LI and RI children are discussed.

Toward an understanding of developmental language and reading disorders.

The primary purpose of this study was to compare the ability of language-impaired and reading-impaired children to process (i.e., encode and retrieve) phonological information. Four measures of phonological awareness and several measures of word and sentence repetition abilities were used to evaluate phonological processing skills. Two additional measures assessed children's awareness of lexical and morphological information. Subjects were 12 language-impaired (LI), 12 reading-impaired (RI), and 12 normal children between the ages of 6 and 8 years. The findings supported previous claims that children with reading impairments have difficulty processing phonological information. To our surprise, however, the LI children performed significantly worse than the RI children on only three measures, all involving word and sentence repetition. These findings raise questions about the distinctiveness of school-age children with a history of language impairment and poor readers with no history of language impairment.

Simplification of /s/ + stop consonant clusters: a developmental perspective.

This longitudinal study examined individual patterns and changes in /s/ + stop cluster simplifications of six normally developing children. Subjects produced selected words containing initial voiced and voiceless stops and /s/ + stop clusters at monthly intervals. Speech samples were transcribed phonetically, and voice onset times (VOT) of the stop consonants were measured. The results revealed that subjects reduced clusters most frequently to stop consonants with short-lag VOTs. However, two children also occasionally employed prevoicing, and one subject used long-lag VOTs in cluster-reduced stops. Because cluster-reduced stops and voiced singleton stops were generally produced with similar VOTs, it was concluded that subjects represented clustered stops most frequently as phonemically voiced.

Management of sentence production demands.

This study examined the effects of variations in language complexity on young children's phonological accuracy and consistency of target words. A more general intent was to understand better the way in which developmental level and children's tolerance of speech variability influenced the management of processing demands. Seven children aged 22-34 months were seen six times over a 4-month period. During these sessions, children were presented with an elicited imitation task consisting of 18 stimulus words, each of which occurred in eight sentences of varying language complexity. Younger children in Language Stage III were found to be more influenced by changes in language complexity than older children in Language Stages IV and V. Within-stage differences were also found. Moreover, in contrast to previous research, children showed as many improvements in phonological accuracy with increases in language complexity as they did decreases in phonological accuracy. It was suggested that between-stage differences were primarily caused by differences in developing speech, language, and cognitive abilities, whereas within-stage differences were primarily caused by differences in the extent to which children tolerated variability in their speech. Based on this contention, some speculations were offered concerning the way in which normal and disordered children manage processing demands.

Hypothesis-testing and nonlinguistic symbolic abilities in language-impaired children.

This study sought to clarify further the cognitive abilities of language-impaired children by examining their hypothesis-testing and nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. A discrimination learning task and a concept formation task were used to measure hypothesis-testing abilities, and a haptic (touch) recognition task was used to assess nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. Subjects were 10 language-impaired and 10 language-normal children matched for performance Mental Age. Measures of expressive and receptive language were also obtained from each child. The language-impaired children were found to perform significantly poorer than their MA controls on the haptic recognition task and on a portion of the discrimination learning task. No differences were found between the two groups' concept formation abilities. Correlational analyses revealed a particularly strong positive relationship between performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the haptic recognition tasks. It was speculated that this relationship was motivated by the symbolic demands of these tasks. One implication of this speculation is that a symbolic representational deficit might better explain the receptive language deficit than the expressive one.

Speech timing of phonologically disordered children: voicing contrast of initial and final stop consonants.

Speech timing of nine phonologically disordered and nine normally developing children was investigated for the voicing contrasts of word-initial and word-final stop consonants. Measurements of voice onset time, vowel duration, consonant closure duration, and voicing during consonant closure were made from spectrograms. In addition, listener transcriptions were employed for perceptual analysis. Results indicated that some phonologically disordered subjects failed to differentiate VOT in word-initial voiced and voiceless stops, whereas others produced much longer VOTs for voiceless stops than did control subjects. In the word-final voicing contrast, the phonologically disordered children evidenced longer consonant closure durations and less voicing during consonant closure than did normal subjects. However, like normal subjects, they demonstrated differential vowel and consonant closure durations in voiced and voiceless contexts. Perceptual analysis indicated significantly more voicing errors in the initial final stops of phonologically disordered children. These various results are interpreted to mean that some phonologically disordered children may have less mature speech timing control. The implications of these data for the description of voicing errors also are discussed.