The Phonological, Syntactic and Semantic Skills of Children with Specific Reading Disability

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between spoken language skills and specific reading disability. The performance of twenty 8 to 10 year old poor readers was compared to that of matched “good” readers on a series of tasks assessing phonological, syntactic and semantic processing skills. Significant group differences were found between the “good” and “poor” readers on all tasks, with the poor readers' performance being inferior. However the mean difference between group performances on total phonological tasks was greater than the mean difference on the total semantic/syntactic tasks. These results provide further evidence that a variety of linguistic deficits are associated with specific reading disability in older children, and that phonological processing skills may be the language domain that is most discriminatory. The teaching implications of these findings are discussed.