Kartlegging av førskolebarns språkutvikling og risiko for å utvikle dysleksi i skolealder

This study assessed the screening instrument TRAS (Tidlig Registrering Av Språkutvikling) as a tool to identify children at - risk for developmental dyslexia. The introduction gives an overview of theories related to children`s language development and screening of their speech - and language development. Dyslexia is a language – based developmental disorder and the term dyslexia is discussed. Linguistic and cognitive benchmarks of developmental dyslexia are described. An at-risk index (RI – 5), based on a questionnaire given to caretakers and teachers, was calculated to identify the at-risk children when they were 5 years old. The RI – 5 questions were based on evidence based benchmarks of dyslexia. A control – group was matched by age and gender. In a follow – up study when the children were 11 years old, thirteen children were diagnosed with developmental dyslexia, based on tests of literacy. The children who did not develop dyslexia, served as a typical – group. First, the present study had a prospective design. When the children were 5 years of age, TRAS was used to assess the at-risk and control groups’ speech - and language development. Secondly, a retrospective design was used to see how the dyslexic group scored, compared with the typical group. Except from the domains “word production” and “language comprehension”, all the other TRAS sub scores and the composite TRAS score correlated significantly with the RI – 5. Except for the domains “word production” and “language comprehension”, significant differences were seen between the at-risk and control groups. T – Tests yielded the largest between - group differences on the “phonological awareness” scores, on both analyses. Scores on “sentence production” also showed significant difference between dyslexic - and typical group. Based on these results, TRAS seemed to be a useful speech - and language screening - tool to identify children at - risk of developmental dyslexia as early as in preschool. The study supports research showing that “phonological awareness” is a reliable and early predictor of language impairment in dyslexia