Pages 560-561 from Owens textbook - Language Disorders

Language Disorders: Key Concepts

Semantic Awareness

  • Definition: Understanding that words have meanings.

Morphological Awareness

  • Definition: Recognizing that words can be divided into component morphemes, identifying families of words and their shared meanings.

Phonological Processing

  • Children with expressive phonological delays (EPD):

    • Exhibit poorer phonemic perception and phonological awareness than typically developing (TD) peers (Rvachew et al., 2003).

    • Difficulties arise from failure to analyze words into syllables and smaller phonological units.

  • Factors correlated with decoding skills in children with typical development (TD) and language disorder (TDL):

    • Phonological processing

    • Environmental or classroom quality in first grade (Tambyraja et al., 2015).

    • Importance of assessing phonological awareness (PA) in struggling readers and advocating for a language-rich curriculum.

Morphological Skills Deficits

  • Children with language disorders develop initial Morphological Generalizations (MGRs) less robustly than peers with TDL (Wolter & Apel, 2010).

  • Children showing little interest in print may struggle to extract recognizable patterns.

  • Dyslexic children often show weak or atypical morphological skills (Breadmore & Carroll, 2016a, 2016b; Carroll & Breadmore, 2018).

  • Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show weak morphological awareness (MA).

Comprehension Deficits

Early Reading Acquisition

  • Comprehension deficits may not emerge at the onset of reading acquisition when phonics is prioritized.

  • Phonics-related issues may decrease by third grade; however, comprehension issues frequently persist (Foster & Miller, 2007).

  • Poor reading comprehension is linked more to poor oral language than phonics skills (Nation & Frazier Norbury, 2005).

Long-term Effects of Poor Reading Comprehension

  • Students with poor comprehension may resort to reading simpler, below-grade-level texts, leading to a deeper decline in reading ability (Stanovich, 2000).

Comprehension Challenges in ASD

  • Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often face persistent residual difficulties in reading comprehension, spelling, and composition without targeted instruction in morphological, syntactic awareness, and comprehension strategies (Berninger, 2008).

  • Distinction between reading-based Learning Disabilities (LD) and ASD:

    • Reading-based LD commonly involves difficulties in phonological/orthographic coding and spelling rather than comprehension or syntax (Berninger, 2007a, 2007b, 2008).

Individual Variability in Literacy among Kids with ASD

  • Many children with ASD exhibit high print-related skills, such as alphabet knowledge, but have lower meaning-related abilities (Westerveld & Roberts, 2017).

  • The fascination with letter shapes may detract from developing shared reading and understanding mental states.

Deficits in Inferencing

Importance of Inference Construction

  • Inference aids coherence in comprehension for spoken and written texts (Cain et al., 2001; Virtue et al., 2006; Virtue & van den Broek, 2004).

  • Language disorder severity impacts inferencing abilities; not every child exhibits the same challenges.

  • Children with DLD struggle significantly with elaborative inferencing compared to peers with low language proficiency and those with TDL.

  • Positive associations exist between inferencing ability and:

    • Vocabulary knowledge

    • Single word reading accuracy

    • Grammatical skill

    • Verbal Working Memory (WM) (Gough Kenyon et al., 2018).

Challenges in Answering Inferential Questions

  • 12.5% of children with TDL find inferential questions difficult compared to over 50% of children with language disorders. (Lucas & Frazier Norbury, 2015).

  • Language ability may play a more significant role in comprehension challenges for children with high-functioning ASD than ASD itself.