The Beginnings of Literacy among Czech-Speaking Children with Developmental Dysphasia as Compared to their Normally Developing Contemporaries

The development of literacy may be impaired by the presence of developmental disorders in the area of speech and linguistic abilities. The most frequently studied disorders of this kind include developmental dyslexia and developmental dysphasia, which as many studies háve shown háve a close if not direct causal relationship. Around half of children with developmental dysphasia háve problems at school age with ac-quisition of written language (reading, writing), but experts háve so far failed to find a clear answerto the question of which deficits of developmental dyspha-sia are the specific risk factors for the development of reading and writing.
In the study presented in this páper we monitored the development of 19 dysphasic children (DD) and 37 typically developing children (TD) from preschool age to the end of the firstyear of primary school. We found that at the end of the first year 58 % of the dysphasic children achieved significantly worse results than their normally developing contemporaries in tasks focused on one or other of the fields of developing literacy (reading, writing, reading with understanding). We try to give readers an account of the structure of linguistic deficits among Czech-speaking dysphasic children with an eye to the effect of these deficits on the acquisition of written speech.