Abstract:
Slowness in rapid naming of visual stimuli is a typical problem of both Specific Language Impairment (Miller et al., 2001; Kleemans et al., 2012; McGregor et al., 2002) and Developmental Dyslexia (Swan & Goswami, 1997). Moreover, longitudinal studies (Wolf & Obregon, 1992) confirm the association between image naming deficits in kindergarten and the occurrence of a subsequent reading disorder, showing a particular correlation between slowness in naming tasks and text decoding difficulties, rather than text comprehension difficulties.
In this study, a group of Italian dyslexic children with and without SLI were compared with an age-matched group of typically developing children on tasks of rapid naming, written decoding, reading and syntactic comprehension, and clitic production, in order to identify differences and correlations between performances of differently impaired subjects. The theoretical framework was only partially confirmed. The results were interpreted in light of the Double Deficit Hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, 1999; Wolf & Obregon, 1992, 1997), which was supplemented with a psycholinguistic hypothesis supporting multifactor models of learning disorders.
