عوامل پیش بینی کننده مهارتهای اولیه سواد در کودکان دارای ناتوانی ذهنی: چشم انداز بالینی

The present study investigated the linguistic and cognitive predictors of early literacy in 17 children with intellectual disabilities (ID) (mean age: 7; 6 years) compared to 24 children with normal language acquisition (NLA) (mean age: 6; 0 years), who were all in the so-called partial alphabetic phase of reading (Ehri, 2005). In each group, children's performances in early literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and word decoding) were assessed, as well as their achievement in linguistic and cognitive measures associated to these skills. The results showed that, notwithstanding the fact that there were no differences in word decoding, children with ID lagged behind on all predictor measures relevant to early literacy skills compared to children with NLA. Moreover, whereas children with NLA showed a regular predictive pathway of early literacy skills, children with ID showed a deviant pattern, in which nonverbal intelligence and rhythmic skills proved to be of major importance. Also letter knowledge appeared to be involved in their early literacy processing. It can be tentatively concluded that in the ID group, children's level of nonverbal intellectual abilities in combination with rhythmic ability proves pivotal in the development of their early literacy skills.

Most children learn to read seemingly effortlessly from first grade onwards, but this process is less obvious in children with intellectual disabilities (ID). In children with normal language acquisition (NLA), the palette of linguistic and cognitive predictors of early literacy skills seems to be quite clear (Hammill, 2004 and National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). And although problems that children with significant ID encounter in acquiring early literacy skills are well established (Erickson, Hanser, Hatch, & Sanders, 2009), little is known about the linguistic and cognitive correlates of these skills. Most research in the domains of literacy and ID was on a specific subgroup of ID (e.g. Down's Syndrome; Martin et al., 2009, Næss et al., 2012 and Yoder and Warren, 2004), or included a population with a larger age-span and with only a small subset of predictors (e.g. Barker et al., 2013, Chanell et al., 2013, Soltani and Roslan, 2013 and Wise et al., 2010). In the present study, we therefore investigated the role of linguistic and cognitive skills associated with early literacy skills (i.e. phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and word decoding) in both six to eight year old children with NLA and children with ID with various etiologies, in the partial alphabetic phase of literacy learning.