Download or read book Linguistic Abilities in Developmental Dyslexia and Specific Language Impairment (SLI) written by Ioanna Talli and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinction and overlap between Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is an issue of high controversy, SLI being mostly explained by deficits in morpho-syntacic skills and DD by deficits in word-level reading skills and in phonological reading-related skills (phonological segmentation, especially at the phonemic level, phonological short-term memory plus rapid and precise access to words, assessed by a rapid serial naming task). In the present thesis we compared word-level reading skills, phonological reading-related skills plus oral and written morpho syntactic skills of French and Greek speaking children with SLI and with DD to those of typically developing children of the same chronological age (CA controls) and of the same reading age (RA controls). With respect to the comparison between the two clinical groups, whatever the language, there was a more significant impairment in phonological short-term memory and morpho-syntactic skills for children with SLI and a more significant impairment for word-level reading skills for children with DD. Language specific deficits were also found: (1) there were more marked deficits at the morpho-syntactic level, at least in oral language comprehension, in Greek than in French; (2) there were more marked deficits in naming tasks in Greek than in French; (3) there were more marked deficits in syllabic than in phonemic segmentation in Greek. We discuss the implications of our findings (especially what appear not to be language specific and what appear to be language specific) for the characterisation of the deficits in SLI and DD in the light of current models of overlap between these disorders.