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...and North America (USA: SLI, in parts of Canada: dysphagia) and more recently primary language disorder (Tomblin, Buckwalter, & O'Brien, 2003). The population is heterogeneous with the specific nature of their problems residing with one or more subcomponents of the language system. We use the term specific language impairment to reflect the most common usage in the literature.)
These children experience problems with the acquisition and processing of oral language skills. The most commonly used core criterion to identify children with SLI is that their language problems cannot be explained in terms of other cognitive, neurological, or perceptual deficits. Problems are characterized by a protracted rate of language development as well as particular difficulties with subcomponents of the language system (Leonard, 1998). Cognitive levels of explanations of SLI have yet to reach a consensus on whether language abilities exhibit a particularly salient impairment arising from a domain-general deficit such as processing capacity or speed (Miller, Kail, Leonard, & Tomblin, 2001) or whether the disorder represents a language-specific deficit (van der Lely, 2005). There is more agreement that the disorder is heterogeneous in terms of language profiles (Conti-Ramsden & Botting, 1999) and in the severity of expressive and receptive language impairment (Bishop, 2002).
Recently progress has been made in identifying the core linguistic deficits of SLI. Measurements that tap into children's proficiencies with phonological processing, sentence recall, nonword repetition, and tense marking have all demonstrated high levels of specificity and sensitivity in differentiating children with SLI from their typically developing peers (Bishop et al., 1999; Bishop, North, & Donlan, 1996; Briscoe, Bishop, & Norbury, 2001; Conti-Ramsden, Botting, & Faragher, 2001; Ellis Weismer et al., 2000; Rice, 2000). Although conventionally identified by discrepancy criteria, children with SLI are also heterogeneous in terms of nonverbal skills (Botting, Faragher, Simkin, Knox, & Conti-Ramsden, 2001). Patterns of performance vary over time both in terms of linguistic skills (Law, Boyle, Harris, Harkness, & Nye, 2000) and nonverbal ability (Botting, 2005).
Children's linguistic deficits have marked effects on the processing of written text (Bishop & Snowling, 2004). Difficulties are evident in both word reading and comprehension (Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002; Stothard, Snowling, Bishop, Chipchase, & Kaplan, 1998). These reading problems are not explained by phonological awareness problems alone (Bashir & Scavuzzo, 1992; Bishop & Snowling). As with linguistic performance there is considerable variability within the population on these measures, only some of which is explained by variance in language competence and cognitive skills (Young et al., 2002). Such difficulties further compromise the children's developmental trajectories.
Surprisingly, and in marked contrast to the extensive work on the written language of children with learning disabilities (Graham, Harris, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1991; Li & Hamel, 2003), few studies have considered the written language skills of children with SLI and the cognitive mechanisms that support writing for these children. The nature and extent of the combination of language and literacy difficulties that are associated with SLI would suggest that these children should also have severe limitations in the generation of written text.
WRITTEN LANGUAGE IN CHILDREN WITH SLI
There are a number of reasons to predict that children with SLI would experience difficulties with writing. These reasons can be considered across three domains: language, literacy, and working memory. The difficulties that children with SLI experience at the word (Leonard, Eyer, Bedore, & Grela, 1997; Messer & Dockrell, 2006), and sentence level (van der Lely & Ullman, 2001) will impact on the infrastructure of the written text and may result in shorter texts with reduced content, the production of simple rather than complex sentences, and the omission of prepositions, articles, and inflectional morphology (Leonard, McGregor, & Allen, 1992; Rice & Oetting, 1993). Associated problems with phonological awareness may affect writing through increased numbers of spelling errors (Clarke-Klein, 1994; Lewis & Freebairn, 1992; Treiman, 1991). In addition, the high cognitive demands placed on the individual in creating written text may overload a working memory system that is, arguably, reduced in processing capacity in children with SLI (Ellis Weismer, Evans, & Hesketh, 1999; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990; Montgomery, 2000; Windsor & Hwang, 1999). Thus vulnerabilities with language should lead to limitations in the production of written text. However, literacy skills could also serve as a moderating factor where children with more competent reading and spelling levels compensate for limited language skills. In sum, children with SLI should experience difficulties in producing coherent and grammatical text. The extent of the problems with writing should be related to language levels, but text production may be further moderated by literacy and phonological working memory.
Despite the substantial indirect evidence that children with SLI will have difficulties with written language, there have been limited attempts to specify the nature and extent of the children's problems beyond single word spelling. Yet there is a substantial variation in the written narrative skill of children with SLI that is not captured by single word spelling (Bishop & Clarkson, 2003). The few published studies that have examined the written texts of children with SLI provide a mixed picture of the factors that limit the production of written text. Children with SLI do indeed produce a high number of spelling errors (Bishop & Clarkson; Lewis & Freebairn, 1992; Treiman, 1991), particularly phonological errors (Clarke-Klein, 1994; Mackie & Dockrell, 2004), and error patterns can deviate from those of chronological age (CA) but not language matched (LA) peers (Mackie & Dockrell). Children with SLI show an increased level of grammatical errors in the written form (Gillam & Johnston, 1992; Mackie & Dockrell; Scott & Windsor, 2000; Windsor, Scott, & Street, 2000); more verb composite errors (Windsor, Scott, & Street), and the omission of both whole words and of plural inflections (Mackie & Dockrell).
However, Bishop and Clarkson (2003) found that these children's most common associated problems were not grammatical difficulties but problems with spelling and punctuation, and poorer semantic content. They argued that it was the children's phonological processing deficits that were central in causing the children's written language problems and that this was demonstrated by the close link with the children's difficulties in repeating nonwords. Together, these studies would suggest that text production in children with SLI is related, primarily, to poor syntactic and phonological skills. However their explanatory power requires further clarification given the failure to consider (a) concurrent versus predictive causes of writing difficulties, (b) the moderating effect of children's literacy levels, and (c) the importance of working memory limitations for this population.
Current research on the writing skills of children with SLI has been based on concurrent studies, which consider the children's writing skills at a particular point in time and provide a profile of the textual difficulties in comparison to CA and in some cases LA matches. Current deficits may not be indicative of causal mechanisms (Bishop & Snowling, 2004) and, since written language skills are built on competencies in other tasks, examination of both longitudinal and concurrent competencies is an important component in understanding the nature and extent of the children's written language deficits. Reciprocal relationships between language and reading skills (Share & Silva, 1987), for example, point to the importance of examining both reading and language performance over time in relation to writing. A longitudinal study of children with SLI offers the opportunity to examine these developmental relationships.
Second, studies examining the writing skills of children with SLI have not addressed the possibility that limitations in the production of written text may be mediated by reduced levels of reading abilities. Given the frequently reported associations between SLI and difficulties in reading (Gallagher, Frith, & Snowling, 2000; McArthur, Hogben, Edwards, Heath, & Mengler, 2000), both literacy and language measures should be collected to establish the extent to which the writing problems experienced by children with SLI are influenced by their difficulties in reading.
Third, it is important to establish the ways in which other cognitive resources available to the child support the production of written text. Nonverbal ability plays a role in the children's overall language (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987) and literacy progress (Bird, Bishop, & Freeman, 1995). Consequently an important control variable in studies of written text composition is the children's nonverbal ability. This is particularly important given the reported shifting profile of the nonverbal skills of many children with SLI (Botting, 2005). Working memory also contributes to the development of written composition, independently of reading skill (Swanson & Berninger, 1994). Because phonological short-term memory has been identified as a weakness in children with SLI (Bishop et al., 1996; Conti-Ramsden & Hesketh, 2003; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990), limitations in written production may reflect limitations in cognitive efficiency rather than language limitations per se (but see Bishop & Clarkson, 2003).
PURPOSE
This study aims to address the ways in which concurrent and predictive measures of language, literacy, and processing limitations are related to writing in a sample of children with SLI. It is predicted that, similar to other cohorts of children with learning disabilities, children with SLI will be at an early stage of developing writing competence and their performance will be influenced by limitations in basic skills such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. In addition, it is predicted that the children will have specific difficulties with production of text and that these problems will be related to their language and phonological skills, both concurrently and over time. Children's levels of reading and spelling should moderate but not explain writing performance.
To test these predictions a cohort of children who had been selected as having SLI at 8 years, 3 months completed a range of language, reading, and cognitive measures at a mean age of 10 years, 8 months during their final year of elementary school education. A battery of language and literacy tests was identified to assess skills at the two different age points. Language assessments provided measures of the current psycholinguistic markers of SLI (phonology and...
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