Linguistic factors in reading disability: a model for assessing children who are without overt language impairment

Abstract

Reading is now widely considered to be a language-based skill. For this reason, speech-language clinicians have begun to involve themselves, in a collaborative fashion, with two populations of reading-disabled children: the traditional population who have historical or current speech-language disorders of a clearly identifiable nature, and a new population with neither a history nor current symptoms of overt speech- language disorder. The latter group serves as the focus of this paper. A suggested cohesive system for the assessment of both lower and higher order linguistic associates of reading disability is presented, along with associated theoretical rationale.