Background: Comorbidity among developmental disorders such as dyslexia, language impairment, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and developmental coordination disorder is common. This study explores comorbid weaknesses in preschool children at family risk of dyslexia with and without language impairment and considers the role that…

Background: Intervention studies for children at risk of dyslexia have typically been delivered preschool, and show short-term effects on letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, with little transfer to literacy. Methods: This randomised controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of a reading and language intervention for 6-year-old children…

Background: Children at family risk of dyslexia have been reported to show phonological deficits as well as broader language delays in the preschool years. Method: The preschool language skills of 112 children at family risk of dyslexia (FR) at ages 3½ and 4½ were compared with those of children with SLI and typically developing (TD) controls.…

Background: Oral language skills in the preschool and early school years are critical to educational success and provide the foundations for the later development of reading comprehension. Methods: In a randomized controlled trial, 180 children from 15 UK nursery schools ("n" = 12 from each setting; M[subscript age] = 4;0) were randomly…

This article reviews our understanding of reading disorders in children and relates it to current proposals for their classification in DSM-5. There are two different, commonly occurring, forms of reading disorder in children which arise from different underlying language difficulties. Dyslexia (as defined in DSM-5), or decoding difficulty, refers…

Background: This study evaluates the effects of a language and literacy intervention for children with Down syndrome. Methods: Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver a reading and language intervention to children in individual daily 40-min sessions. We used a waiting list control design, in which half the sample received the…

Background: This study compares the efficacy of two school-based intervention programmes (Phonology with Reading (P + R) and Oral Language (OL)) for children with poor oral language at school entry. Methods: Following screening of 960 children, 152 children (mean age 4;09) were selected from 19 schools on the basis of poor vocabulary and verbal…

Background: This study is the follow-up in early adolescence of children born to families with a history of dyslexia ( Gallagher, Frith, & Snowling, 2000). Methods: Fifty young people with a family history of dyslexia and 20 young people from control families were assessed at 12-13 years on a battery of tests of literacy and language skills, and…

Background: Evidence suggests there is a heightened risk of psychiatric disorder in children with speech-language impairments. However, not all forms of language impairment are strongly associated with psychosocial difficulty, and some psychiatric disorders (e.g., attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)) are more prevalent than others in…

Background: This study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention for reading-delayed children in Year-1 classes. Methods: A sample (N = 77) of children drawn from 14 schools representing those with the weakest reading skills were randomly allocated to one of two groups. A 20-week intervention group received the intervention for two…

Background: Dyslexia is now generally acknowledged to involve difficulties in phonological processing. However, the links between reading difficulties and speech difficulties remain unclear. Method: In the present study, 17 children with speech difficulties between the ages of four and six were compared to children with a family history of…

We summarize some of the most important findings from research evaluating the hypothesized causes of specific reading disability ("dyslexia") over the past four decades. After outlining components of reading ability, we discuss manifest causes of reading difficulties, in terms of deficiencies in component reading skills that might lead to such…

Background: We evaluate the effectiveness of three theoretically motivated programmes for the teaching of reading to four-year-old children. Method: Four hundred and ten children, of pre-kindergarten age, in 20 UK Reception-year classrooms were divided into four matched groups and randomly assigned to one of three experimental teaching conditions,…