engleski

The influence of language and cognitive skills on early literacy in SLI children exposed to different orthographies

An extensive body of research suggests that children with SLI have deficits in both aspects of verbal working memory (VWM), i.e., phonological memory (PM) and working memory (WM) capacity – necessary literacy precursors within the cognitive domain (Gathercole, et al., 1992 ; Montgomery, 1995, 2004 ; Conti-Ramsden, 2003 ; Zaretsky, 2003 ; Archibald and Gathercole, 2007 ; Montgomery and Windsor, 2007). Sixty (60) kindergartners: 30 English-speaking children and 30 Croatian speakers, half of them with specific language impairment, were tested in this study in order to answer the question: are there observable differences in the interaction between reading precursors and early reading achievements between the linguistic groups, based on the presence or absence of the disorder? Results indicate that the psycholinguistic profiles of TLD and SLI children in both linguistic groups are similar. Moreover, it could be say that children with SLI have universal characteristics, such as decreased vocabulary, phonological awareness, PM and WM capacity, as well as poorer knowledge of alphabet regardless of the language of exposure. Regarding the interaction between language and cognitive skills within the reading pre-requisites, results indicated language-specific differences e.g. SLI English-speaking children had to rely on WM and alphabet knowledge for performing different phonological awareness tasks, while Croatian SLIs relied exclusively on alphabet knowledge. Examining the predictive nature of reading pre- requisites on the development of PA and early reading and spelling skills, the results also pointed to different trajectories, based on the language of exposure ; English-speaking TLD rely on PM to develop PA skills, while Croatian speakers draw equally on all the available resources, linguistic and cognitive.

early literacy; SLI; cognitive skills; ortography

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