LANGUAGE AND LITERACY IN NONVOCAL CHILDREN WITH CEREBRAL-PALSY

Metalinguistic and literacy abilities were studied in twenty-seven non vocal cerebral palsied school children. The participants of the study were presented four tests of phonological awareness. rhyme recognition , sound identification, phoneme synthesis and word length analysis. Th eir verbal comprehension was measured using a semantic and a syntactic task. Two tests of nonverbal memory: the visual sequential task from ITPA and Corsi blocks and the Digit Span task from WISC, were also inc luded. These measures were related to their reading and spelling abili ty. The nonvocal children performed on a lower level on the reading an d spelling tasks than did the children of two comparison groups. one m atched for mental age and one for mental and chronological age. There were no differences in phonological awareness or in verbal memory. The disabled children performed worse on the verbal comprehension task th an the children in the comparison groups. Although the reading and spe lling results were low in the nonvocal group there were children showi ng some literacy skills. A within-group analysis performed in the nonv ocal group showed that the reading children performed better on all me mory tests, and on the sound identification and the word length analys is tasks than the nonreading ones. They also showed better results on verbal comprehension, the semantic task and used more symbols in their communication. Synthetic speech was more often used in reading and sp elling education in the reading subgroup than in the nonreading. Metal inguistic abilities and possibility of acoustic rehearsal are discusse d as important factors in reading and spelling acquisition in the nonv ocal population.