Promoting Reading Achievement in Children With Developmental Language Disorders: What Can We Learn From Research on Specific Language Impairment and Dyslexia?
Suzanne M Adlof
PMID 33064604WHAT IT FOUND
Children with developmental language disorder often go unidentified because their reading skills appear normal.
Screening for oral language weaknesses in school reading programs can catch these hidden deficits early. This allows access to support before reading comprehension problems emerge in later grades.
Key findings
01Children with developmental language disorder who have good word reading skills are less likely to receive clinical services in primary grades than those with co-occurring dyslexia.
02Most children identified with language or reading difficulties in school-based samples had not received special education services, with the lowest rates for those with language disorder only.
03Existing school response-to-intervention frameworks focus heavily on word reading and rarely include direct monitoring of oral language skills like vocabulary and syntax.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This is a narrative review, not a systematic review or meta-analysis, so the selection of studies may reflect author bias. The review focuses primarily on monolingual English-speaking children, limiting direct applicability to multilingual populations where typical language development milestones differ. It discusses potential screening tools but does not report new data on their diagnostic accuracy in universal school settings.
Declared interests
The work was supported by grants from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health. No commercial conflicts of interest are reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a child with normal word reading skills has no language disorder. The review highlights that children with SLI-only are frequently missed because their decoding abilities mask underlying oral language weaknesses that will later impair reading comprehension.