An on-going debate surrounds the relationship between specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia, in particular with respect to their phonological abilities. Are these distinct disorders? To what extent do they overlap? Which cognitive and linguistic profiles correspond to specific language impairment, dyslexia and comorbid cases? At least three different models have been proposed: the severity model, the additional deficit model and the component model. We address this issue by comparing children with specific language impairment only, those with dyslexia-only, those with specific language impairment and dyslexia and those with no impairment, using a broad test battery of language skills. We find that specific language impairment and dyslexia do not always co-occur, and that some children with specific language impairment do not have a phonological deficit. Using factor analysis, we find that language abilities across the four groups of children have at least three independent sources of variance: one for non-phonological language skills and two for distinct sets of phonological abilities (which we term phonological skills versus phonological representations). Furthermore, children with specific language impairment and dyslexia show partly distinct profiles of phonological deficit along these two dimensions. We conclude that a multiple-component model of language abilities best explains the relationship between specific language impairment and dyslexia and the different profiles of impairment that are observed.

The Montessori educational method has existed for over 100 years, but evaluations of its effectiveness are scarce. This review paper has three aims, namely to (1) identify some key elements of the method, (2) review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and (3) review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in (1). The goal of the paper is therefore to provide a review of the evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.

Studies have suggested that language and executive function (EF) are strongly associated. Indeed, the two are difficult to separate, and it is particularly difficult to determine whether one skill is more dependent on the other. Deafness provides a unique opportunity to disentangle these skills because in this case, language difficulties have a sensory not cognitive basis. In this study, deaf (n = 108) and hearing (n = 125) children (age 8 years) were assessed on language and a wide range of nonverbal EF tasks. Deaf children performed significantly less well on EF tasks, even controlling for nonverbal intelligence and speed of processing. Language mediated EF skill, but the reverse pattern was not evident. Findings suggest that language is key to EF performance rather than vice versa.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia have phonological deficits that are claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments and to be responsible for the overlap between the two disorders. Little is known, however, about the phonological grammar of children with SLI and dyslexia, and indeed whether they show differences in phonological development. We designed a nonword repetition task to investigate the impact of word position and stress on the production accuracy of onset clusters. We compared the performance of children with SLI and dyslexia, SLI only, and dyslexia only (mean age eleven), and three groups of typically developing children (aged five, seven, and nine). Analysis of cluster production accuracy revealed that all three clinical groups made significantly more errors on word-medial clusters compared to word-initial clusters. Unstressed clusters were more difficult than stressed clusters for the two dyslexic groups but not the SLI-only group. None of the groups of typically developing children showed an effect of word position or stress on cluster accuracy. All groups, however, created new clusters significantly more frequently in initial than medial positions. These results indicate a difference in phonological grammar in children with SLI and dyslexia that could potentially shed light on the relationship between the two disorders. Furthermore, they indicate that structural position and stress are developmentally independent elements in phonological representations.

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are known to have impairments in various aspects of phonology, which have been claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments. However, ‘phonology’ encompasses a wide range of skills, and little is known about whether these phonological impairments extend to prosody.Aims: To investigate certain prosodic abilities of children with SLI and/or dyslexia, to determine whether such children have prosodic impairments, whether they have the same pattern of impairments, and whether prosodic impairments are related to language and literacy deficits.Methods & Procedures: Six subtests of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems — Child version (PEPS‐C) were used to investigate discrimination/comprehension and imitation/production of prosodic forms that were either independent of language or that had one of two linguistic functions: chunking (prosodic boundaries) and focus (contrastive stress). The performance of three groups of 10–14‐year‐old children with SLI plus dyslexia, SLI, and dyslexia were compared with an age‐matched control group and two younger control groups matched for various aspects of language and reading.Outcomes & Results: The majority of children with SLI and/or dyslexia performed well on the tasks that tested auditory discrimination and imitation of prosodic forms. However, their ability to use prosody to disambiguate certain linguistic structures was impaired relative to age‐matched controls, although these differences disappeared in comparison with language‐matched controls. No, or only very weak, links were found between prosody and language and literacy skills in children with SLI and/or dyslexia.Conclusions & Implications: Children with SLI and/or dyslexia aged 10–14 years show an impaired ability to disambiguate linguistic structures for which prosody is required. However, they are able on the whole to discriminate and imitate the actual prosodic structures themselves, without reference to linguistic meaning. While the interaction between prosody and other components of language such as syntax and pragmatics is problematic for children with SLI and/or dyslexia, prosody itself does not appear to be a core impairment.