LECTURE: SLI and dyslexia: same or different?

The University of Western Australia; School of Psychology Child Study Centre; The Australian Psychological Society and the College of Educational and Developmental Psychologists

Present

Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

SLI and dyslexia: same or different?

Although research on specific language impairment (SLI) and developmental dyslexia have traditionally followed separate paths, there has been growing recognition that there are several commonalities between these disorders. When formal diagnostic criteria are applied, around 50% of children with SLI meet criteria for dyslexia, and around 50% of those with dyslexia meet criteria for SLI. Furthermore, many children who have oral language difficulties early in development appear to improve, but then have literacy problems in middle childhood. This has been termed ‘illusory recovery’ by Scarborough, who suggested that the same underlying deficit manifests differently depending on the child’s age. This viewpoint is consistent with current mainstream opinion that regards dyslexia as a phonological disorder, possibly caused by low level auditory perceptual impairment. Indeed, the same theory of ‘auditory temporal processing deficit’ has been used to account for both disorders.

Thus over the years, there has been a loosening of the boundaries between SLI and dyslexia, and some researchers now use a general terms such as ‘language learning disability’ to refer to both oral and written language problems. In my talk, I shall use evidence from both genetic studies and neurobiological investigations to argue that, while we may want to move away from the traditional categories of SLI vs dyslexia, we should not simply collapse the two together.

Dorothy Bishop studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University before going on to complete an M.Phil in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in 1975 and D.Phil at the Neuropsychology Unit in the Radcliffe Infirmary. She was for 20 years funded by the Medical Research Council, first in Oxford, and then at the universities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Manchester, and at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge. In 1998, she moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford, where she is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and heads a programme of research into children’s communication impairments. She is visiting Perth as a Professor at Large at the University of Western Australia.

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