Abstract

Although dyslexia is defined as a problem with learning to read, many children with dyslexia present oral language problems. I will show that about 50% of the children with dyslexia that we tested met the criteria for SLI , based on one clinical marker of SLI in Italian (clitic production) (Arosio et al., submitted). I also show that children with dyslexia, as children with SLI , have problems with complex structures, such as relative clauses. Other areas, such as pragmatics, are less affected in both populations. This indicates that some aspects of language are persistently affected, while others may only temporarily. This is confirmed by ERP studies with adults and children with developmental dyslexia, which. indicate that subjects with dyslexia do not process orally presented ungrammatical sentences in the same way as controls (Cantiani et al., 2012). I assume that this co-occurrence of SLI and dyslexia is not due to chance.