Oral Language Abilities in Children with Dyslexia and Poor Comprehension in Grades 3-6

Objectives: This study investigated receptive vocabulary and morphosyntactic skills of children with dyslexia, poor comprehension, and typically developing children in grade 3 to 6. Methods: A total of 45 children with dyslexia, poor comprehension, and typically developing children participated. In order to qualify for each group, children with dyslexia scored below 85 on the word decoding test, and poor comprehenders scored below 85 on the reading comprehension, but scored above 90 on decoding test. Typically developing children scored a standard score of 90 on both decoding and reading comprehension. All children were administered a receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence repetition, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness tasks. Results: The results showed that there were significant differences in all language tasks. Poor comprehenders scored the lowest on all tasks, followed by children with dyslexia. In the results receptive vocabulary task, there were differences between all three groups; and poor comprehenders performed lower than children with dyslexia and typically developing children on sentence comprehension. In the sentence repetition task, children with poor reading comprehension and dyslexia showed lower performance than typically developing children. Additionally, there were only differences between poor comprehenders and typically developing children in the morphological and syntactic awareness tasks. Conclusion: Poor comprehenders showed difficulties in vocabulary and morphosyntax, and children with dyslexia exhibited weakness of vocabulary and sentence repetitions that require linguistic knowledge and phonological memory. Their weakness of oral language may negatively influence reading development.