Spoken language correlates of reading impairments acquired in childhood

This study reports the reading difficulties of five children following unil ateral left hemisphere stroke sustained either before or during the early s tages of literacy acquisition. Although each of the children experienced a period of disturbed language processing in the initial stages postonset, at the time of testing none of the children were considered to he clinically aphasic. Yet, on a standardized test of oral reading each of the children a chieved a reading age that lagged behind chronological age and marbled read ing impairments were disclosed in four of the five children. A set of stand ardized and nonstandardized tests, aimed at measuring aspects of cognitive and spoken language processing that are considered to be important for norm al reading acquisition, was administered. Where nonstandardized tests were used, performance of each of the stroke children was compared to that of gr oups of normally developing control children, closely matched for chronolog ical age. A range of residual deficits in cognitive and spoken language pro cessing was disclosed among the five brain-damaged children that appeal rd to br associated with their reading impairments. Two children had expectedl y poor reading due to a selective impairment in verbal IQ; a specific phono logical reading disorder was revealed in two children, each of which had a residual impairment to phonological awareness; and delayed reading acquisit ion was observed in one child with a general language deficit. It is sugges ted that when a child suffers damage to the left hemisphere in the early st ages of reading acquisition, difficulties with learning to read are likely to ensue and may arise as a consequence of an underlying cognitive or lingu istic deficit. (C) 2000 Academic Press.