Specific Language Impairment (SLI): Impact on Academic Skills
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and its Impact on Academic Performance
Expressive Language Features in SLI
Expressive language difficulties in SLI can manifest as alterations in phonology and/or morphosyntax. These may include:
- Limited vocabulary
- Difficulty using personal pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and morphological markers (gender, number)
- Difficulty using tenses
- Inadequate sentence structure
- Problems with working memory, particularly phonological memory and awareness
- Difficulty with non-linguistic sequences
- Attention and behavioral regulation problems
Receptive-Expressive Language Features in SLI
Children with receptive-expressive SLI may exhibit difficulties in both understanding and producing language. These can include:
- Difficulty processing complex language
- Inadequate tense and preposition selection
- Problems with sentence production and ordering
- Irrelevant statements
- Behavioral regulation problems
- Gross and fine motor skill problems
- Attention and memory problems
Evolution of SLI in School-Age Children
Studies have shown a correlation between phonological awareness difficulties and literacy development. By age six, children typically possess the language proficiency needed to produce and understand phrases. Reading acquisition involves:
- Visual stimuli
- Analysis of written text
- Language comprehension mechanisms
Two routes to accessing written information:
- Lexical (direct, visual): Words are directly associated with their meaning, involving global and immediate recognition.
- Sublexical (phonological, indirect): Words are converted into sounds by applying grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules.
Impact of Phonological Disorders on Literacy
Persistent SLI can lead to further disharmony in language development, including persistent phonological disorders. These disorders can affect literacy acquisition by hindering word representation. Phonological codes are crucial for accessing pronunciation and meaning when perceiving a word. Difficulties in phonological representation can impact reading and writing skills. Children with SLI may experience lower performance in tasks such as:
- Rapid naming of objects, colors, or letters
- Verbal learning and memory
- Repeating pseudowords
- Phonological awareness tasks
Metalinguistic and Metaphonological Skills
Metalinguistic skills are high-level cognitive abilities essential for understanding and producing language communicatively. They also involve separating language structure from communicative intent and performing mental operations on these features. Early self-correction in children can indicate the presence of these skills. Metaphonological skills, the ability to identify and manipulate phonological components of language, are closely linked to literacy. These skills encompass awareness of different linguistic units, including:
- Rhyme awareness
- Syllabic awareness
- Intrasyllabic awareness
- Phonemic awareness
Phonological awareness is crucial for reading acquisition, particularly understanding the orthographic representation system based on phonological segments.
Morphosyntactic Symptoms in Writing
Children with SLI may exhibit less precision with morphological markers in their writing. They may overuse markers in written narratives compared to oral narratives. Incomplete expressions may also affect oral communication, particularly in narrative contexts. Studies have shown that children with SLI make more errors in narratives than typically developing children.
Reading in Children with SLI
A Spanish study revealed:
- Children with SLI who resolved their language difficulties before age 5.5 demonstrated good reading comprehension at age 8.
- Children with persistent SLI between ages 5 and 6 exhibited reading comprehension problems at age 8.
Comparisons between typically developing children, children with language disorders, and children with articulation problems showed significant reading deficits only in the group with language disorders.
Morphosyntactic Development
Morphology and syntax, along with phonology, constitute the form of language. Morphosyntactic development follows evolutionary patterns, from pre-language stages to grammatical expansion and later syntactic acquisitions.
Pre-language Stage (0-12 months)
- 0-6 months: Non-linguistic vocalizations
- 6-9 months: Vocalizations gain communicative meaning through intonation, prosody, and rhythm.
- 9-10 months: Pre-conversations emerge.
- 10-12 months: Familiar words appear, vocalizations become more accurate, and sounds and syllables are repeated intentionally.
Precursors of Language
These precursors encompass language use, content, form, and pragmatics.
- Pragmatic: Eye contact, social smile, mutual gaze, proto-conversations, communicative interactions
- Content: Attention to visual and auditory stimuli, object permanence, body awareness, object relationships, early symbolism
- Form: Attention to sounds, sound localization, sound differentiation, imitation of sounds, reaction to intonation patterns, involuntary vocalizations, intentional vocalizations, jargon, imitation of syllables and words
First Syntactic Development (12-24 months)
- 12-18 months: First words emerge with semantic extensions.
- 18-24 months: Two-element utterances appear, inflections are used, and negative sentences with “no” emerge.