2018 Sat Session C 1000

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session C, Terrace Lounge | 10am

The relationship between oral language and emergent literacy skills for Spanish-speaking children with and without SLI
A. Pratt, J. Grinstead, M. Cantú-Sánchez, X. Carreto-Guadarrama, A. Arrieta-Zamudio, P. Ortiz-Ramírez

A consequence of being diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) in preschool is an approximately 40% likelihood of experiencing severe reading difficulties in elementary school (Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002). This is true for English-speaking children in the US. What happens with young Spanish-speakers? Our study seeks to better understand this relationship by examining the link between SLI and emergent literacy in monolingual Spanish.

Emergent literacy refers to the knowledge and skills that develop between birth and age five, before a child begins formal schooling, that are strongly predictive of later reading ability (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Such skills can be conceptualized as code-based (those that predict decoding) like phonological awareness and letter knowledge, and meaning-based (those that predict reading comprehension) like narrative language ability. Research in English demonstrates that preschool-aged children with SLI perform significantly worse on code- and meaning-based emergent literacy skills than their typically developing peers (Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999) and that early lags in emergent literacy skills are often maintained throughout elementary school (Skibbe et al., 2008). Though never tested in Spanish, there is reason to suspect that the degree to which emergent literacy skills are affected by a diagnosis of SLI may vary with respect to the reader’s orthography and linguistic environment (Ziegler et al., 2010). While English has a highly irregular orthography, the Spanish orthography has a nearly one-to- one correspondence between letters and sounds.

This study posed two exploratory questions: (1) How do Spanish-speaking children with SLI differ from typically-developing (TD) peers on emergent literacy skills known to be important to later reading? (2) What is the relationship between children’s emergent literacy skills in Spanish and their oral language ability (as characterized by performance on standardized tests of expressive vocabulary and expressive/receptive morphosyntax)?

To this end, we compared the emergent literacy skills of 15 Spanish-speaking children with SLI (mean age = 58.40 months, SD = 9 months) to a group of 15 age-, gender-, and income-matched TD controls (mean age = 60.27 months, SD = 8 months). Descriptions of emergent literacy measures, means, and SDs for both groups are summarized in the attached table.

First, our results indicate that children with SLI performed significantly worse than TD peers on all code-based emergent literacy tasks (Wilks’ Λ = .511, F (6, 21) = 3.65, p = .012), echoing findings from English. Univariate effect sizes for group differences (SLI vs. TD) were robust, with ç_p² values up to .437. Second, correlational date showed that children’s morphosyntactic knowledge, in particular, was a significant predictor of emergent literacy in Spanish. Children’s scores on the “Sentence Structure” subtest of the CELF (Wiig, Secord, & Semel, 2004) were strongly correlated with six of the seven emergent literacy skills that were assessed (ranging from R = .394 to R = .793, p <.05). These results point to some universality regarding how SLI affects reading. Despite the more transparent orthography, children with impaired language ability in Spanish struggled significantly with many of the foundational concepts that underlie reading.