Language production and comprehension in developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment: evidence from Italian and Greek

The current thesis presents the differential profiles of Italian and Greek dyslexic and typically developing children on a series of language tests, tapping both production and comprehension abilities. By highlighting the differential profiles of dyslexic children on a series of language tasks that include structures that have been found to be particularly vulnerable in Specific Language Impairment, the current thesis aims to assist the processes of differential diagnosis, to serve as a base for further investigation of the differences between the two disorders, as well as to contribute to the development of rehabilitation material. The tests that have been implemented focused on the production and comprehension of direct, indirect object clitics, definite articles and wh-questions through elicited production, sentence-picture matching and grammaticality judgment tasks. Moreover, an additional task on the comprehension of wh-questions through meta-syntactic facilitation was introduced. Finally, the results obtained by Greek-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment are presented, again, with an emphasis on the different performance profiles between SLI and typically developing children, as well as on the potential differentiating patterns between typically developing, SLI and dyslexic children.