Literacy achievement of children with intellectual disabilities and differing linguistic backgrounds.
Non-native kids with ID need double support: solid phonics plus rich language, or they will lag in vocabulary and story understanding.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested 69 Dutch kids with intellectual disability. Half spoke Dutch at home. Half spoke another language.
All kids took the same reading tests. The tests checked word reading, spelling, and understanding stories.
The study asked: do non-native kids with ID fall even further behind?
What they found
Every child with ID scored lower than typical peers. That was no surprise.
Non-native kids could sound out words almost as well as native kids. But they fell extra behind on vocabulary and story meaning.
The gap doubled when tasks needed both language and thinking.
How this fits with other research
Scalzo et al. (2015) followed kids for two years. They found early phonics skills predict later reading gains in mild ID. Lecavalier et al. (2006) only took one snapshot, so it looks gloomier. The papers agree: phonics matters, but you must keep measuring.
Chou et al. (2010) showed strong phonological processing links to word reading in mild ID. The target study adds: even with good phonics, language background still hurts comprehension.
Hilton et al. (2010) used the same Dutch schools. They showed phonological short-term memory predicts literacy scores. Memory plus language background together explain why some kids stall.
Why it matters
When you test a child with ID, check both home language and phonological memory. If either is weak, plan extra vocabulary and story talk alongside phonics. Do not wait for comprehension problems to show up.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: The aim of the present study was to examine the literacy achievement of 10- to 12-year-old native and non-native children with intellectual disabilities (ID) living in the Netherlands. An intriguing question within this context was whether the second language learning non-native children with ID would show a double disadvantage when compared with their monolingual Dutch peers with no ID. METHODS: Dutch literacy scores in the domains of word decoding, vocabulary, syntax and text were therefore compared for: (1) intellectually disabled native Dutch children; (2) intellectually disabled non-native children; (3) normally developing native Dutch children; and (4) normally developing non-native children. The interrelations between literacy subskills were also compared for native vs. non-native children with ID. RESULTS: The native and non-native students diagnosed as intellectually disabled produced substantially lower literacy scores than their non-disabled peers. The differences between the native (L1) and non-native (L2) children in regular vs. special education were found to depend on the aspect of literacy considered. Word decoding and language skills turned out to significantly predict the children's reading comprehension, although some differences in the strength of relationships could also be evidenced. CONCLUSIONS: The literacy achievement of intellectually disabled children with differing linguistic backgrounds generally falls behind that of their non-disabled peers. For word decoding, the non-native children in regular and special education were generally able to keep up with their native peers. For higher-order literacy abilities closely related to the mental lexicon, sentence processing and text processing, however, significant differences in the performances of the native (L1) and non-native (L2) children in regular vs. special education were found, suggesting a double disadvantage for the non-native children in special education.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2006 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2006.00838.x