ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the vulnerability of children with spoken language impairments to reading failure, within a connectionist framework. Reading development is conceptualised as a highly interactive process with interplay between phonological and semantic resources. It provides a framework for understanding the observed variation in the literacy skills of language-impaired children. The strength of the evidence relating phonological skills to learning to read is such that it is hard to argue against its central role in reading development. The chapter examines that learning to read comprises the development of decoding, word recognition and text comprehension skills. It argues that there is an interaction between phonological, semantic and syntactic resources during reading development and the demands of reading change with time. A large majority of published studies demonstrating a relationship between phonological skills and reading development have examined how children's performance on tests of phonological awareness predicts their reading skills concurrently or over time.
