The importance of reading stories for the linguistic development of preschool children with language disorders

Abstract

Children with Specific Language Disorders (SLD) have difficulties in linguistic and communication skills that impact their school trajectory, hindering participation and social inclusion. However, reading stories at home can strengthen the acquisition and development of linguistic skills, since they enrich the vocabulary and syllabic awareness, which are related to emergent literacy. The purpose of this study is to determine the level of passive vocabulary, syllabic awareness, and its relationship with reading stories in the family context of 94 preschool students with a diagnosis of SLD, who attend special language schools in the commune of Talca, Chile. The method corresponds to a quantitative approach, with a non-experimental, inferential, transactional, and comparative correlational design. The analysis considers descriptive statistics, bivariate correlation (Pearson), and differences between means applying MANOVA and ANOVA in those measures that integrate the multivariate composite. The analysis was performed using SPSS 18 for Windows. Story reading was found to be statistically related to the multivariate combination of dependent variables such as vocabulary and syllabic awareness. The implications of these findings are discussed