engleski

Differences in distribution of pre-literacy skills and early literacy achievements among kindergartners with and without language impairment: Does orthography matter?

Purpose: This study investigated early reading development among TD children and children with SLI exposed to radically different orthographies. We examined the predictive nature of oral language- (lexicon) and code-related (PA and VWM) skills, as well as alphabet knowledge, on early reading, in view of the orthographic depth hypothesis (Katz & Frost, 1992). Method: 60 kindergartners, 15 in each group of TD and SLI (English- and Croatian-speakers) were assessed on measures of PA, VWM, vocabulary, alphabet knowledge, decoding, sight word recognition and spelling. ANOVAs and regression analyses were utilized to identify the predictive power of code- and oral language-related skills on the development of PA and early reading as a factor of orthography. Results: TD children and children with SLI in both linguistic groups showed similar code- and oral language-related profiles, suggesting the same core deficits in the SLI population regardless of the orthography. However, significant differences were found in the predictive nature of code- and oral language-related components on the development of PA and early reading skills as a factor of deep (English) and shallow (Croatian) orthographies. Conclusion: The results confirmed that the nature of orthography and rich phonological composition of ambient language showcases different distribution of skills in the development of PA and early reading, even among children with SLI, supporting previous research with TD children (Zaretsky, Kuvac, Core & Lancek, 2009) and children with SLI (Zaretsky & Clancy, 2011), that orthography puts emphasis on the use of different pre-requisite skills for PA development and early reading acquisition.

orthography; SLI

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