Oral morphosyntactic competence as a predictor of reading comprehension in children with specific language impairment

Background: Children with a diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) present impaired oral comprehension. According to the simple view of reading, general amodal linguistic capacity accounts for both oral and reading comprehension. Considering this, we should expect SLI children to display a reading comprehension deficit. However, previous research regarding the association between reading disorders and SLI has yielded inconsistent results. Aims: To study the influence of prior oral comprehension competence over reading comprehension during the first years of reading acquisition of bilingual Catalan-Spanish children with SLI (ages 7-8). Methods & Procedures: We assessed groups of bilingual Catalan-Spanish SLI and matched control children at ages 7 and 8 with standardized reading comprehension tasks including grammatical structures, sentence and text comprehension. Early oral competence and prior non-verbal intelligence were also measured and introduced into regression analyses with the participants' reading results in order to state the relation between the comprehension of oral and written material. Outcomes & Results: Although we found no significant differences between the scores of our two participant groups in the reading tasks, data regarding their early oral competence, but not non-verbal intelligence measures, significantly influence their reading outcome. Conclusions & Implications: The results extend our knowledge regarding the course of literacy acquisition of children with SLI and provide evidence in support of the theories that assume common linguistic processes to be responsible for both oral and reading comprehension.