The profile of reading and cognitive skills of children with a history of specific developmental language disorder

The present study aimed to investigate the profile of reading and cognitive skills of primary school' students with a history of specific developmental language disorder during preschool years. The sample comprised 247 children referred for assessment of their reading difficulties to the University Child Psychiatry Department, at the "Aghia Sophia" Children's Hospital, Athens, Greece. The study was retrospective utilizing medical records from where the following information was drawn: demographic data, presence of a diagnosis of a specific developmental language disorder, results of Reading Test-A and WISC-III. Among the 247 children with normal intelligence IQ>80 (mean age: 10.5 years, 61.5% boys) included in the study, 226 (92.5%) were identified as having significant reading difficulties in at least one of the four subtests of the Reading-A Test (≤ 30 percentile); 72% performed poorly in reading fluency, 67.1% in decoding familiar and pseudowords, 52.8% in reading comprehension and 49.8% in morphosyntax subtest. When comparing children with severe reading difficulties (≤ 10 percentile on the Reading Test A) with a history of specific developmental language disorder (N=110) and no relevant history (N=116), the findings indicated that a significantly higher proportion of children with a history of specific language disorder had severe difficulty in morphosyntax (χ2=21.94, p