Word-level reading skills of Brazilian children with developmental language disorder

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show a wide range of impairments, including poor pre-reading skills and decoding difficulties due to phonological deficits and such difficulties have significant repercussions on the acquisition of written language. However, evidence about reading processes and development is mainly available for English-speaking children with DLD, limiting our understanding of this process in a cross-linguistic manner. The orthographic characteristics of languages significantly influence the learning process of written code. Unlike English, Brazilian Portuguese has a transparent decoding system and its orthography presents a set of consistent, univocal grapheme-phoneme relations. The present study investigated whether the challenges reported in decoding for children with DLD in opaque languages hold for children with DLD who are speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and whether the length and type of stimuli influence the decoding skills of children with DLD differently than when compared to children with typical language development (TLD). Sixteen children with DLD between seven and ten years of age who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and 64 controls with TLD matched by gender, age, and socioeconomic status, with the children with DLD in a 4:1 ratio; participated in the study. All children performed a computerized task where they were asked to decode a linguistically balanced list of words and nonwords designed according to Brazilian Portuguese decoding rules. The present study provides substantial evidence that children with DLD who are speakers of Brazilian Portuguese have deficits in the acquisition of decoding and that the decoding profile of children with DLD is subject to multiple influences, not only with relation to the length and type of stimuli but also characteristics of the languages these children are being literate in, highlighting the multifactorial nature involved in the development of decoding.