Language disorders and literacy disorders: Are they same or different disorders?
The guest writer of this article is Dr Noel Chia Kok Hwee, a board-certified educational therapist and registered reading therapist.
In 1993, the Ad Hoc Committee on Service Delivery in the Schools set up by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASLHA) defined language disorder as follows: “A language disorder is impaired comprehension and/or use of spoken, written, and/or other symbol systems. This disorder may involve (1) the form of language (phonology, morphology, syntax), (2) the content of language (semantics), and/or (3) the function of language in communication (pragmatics) in any combination” (p.40).
At about the same time, also in 1993, Anthony V. Manzo of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Ula C. Manzo of the School District of Kansas City, Missouri, coined the term Literacy Disorders to describe reading disorders, severe reading disability (SRD) and/or dyslexia which they also included hyperlexia as a part of that category of disorders in their book Literacy Disorders: Holistic Diagnosis and Remediation (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers).
Are language disorders and literacy disorders refer to the same thing? The answer is a definite no. A language disorder is seen as a disorder of systemic deficits observed in the main components of language: phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics. On the other hand, a literacy disorder should be seen as a disorder of specific deficits in reading and writing. It can be further divided into sub-categories: process literacy disorder and product literacy disorder. The former concerns the reading and/or writing/spelling process(es); the latter, the reading and/or writing outcomes.
In his article “Bridging Reading and Writing: A Cognitive Equation of Literacy” published in the ASCD Review (Singapore) Vol.13, Chia (2007) showed how reading and writing processes are linked to each other by a third cognitive process he called fantasizing, which in turn, involves thinking through self-monitoring and meta-comprehension in the reading process, and through transcription and sub-creating in the writing process (see p.9). In the reading process, decoding and comprehension are the key cognitive components; in the writing process, encoding and composition. Moreover, these literacy processes are easily affected by exrinsic and intrinsic factors. Extrinsic factors include setting and purpose, which depends on either a reader’s expectation or a writer’s intent, while intrinsic factors include background knowledge and/or previous experiences as well as motivation which comes from interest. In addition, both literacy processes are also linked by the underlying language system which is made of five main components: phonology, orthography (morphology), semantics, syntax, and discourse (the last three form the grammar of the language). Hence, according to the present contributing writer of this article, language disorder concerns the deficits of the underlying language system components, while literacy disorder concerns reading deficits (e.g., alexia and dyslexia) or writing deficits (e.g., dysorthographia and dysgraphia), which may, in turn, be affected by external settings, background knowledge and prior experiences, motivation, and purpose. The kind of outcome seen in either reading or writing results in positive or negative product literacy. Negative product literacy is termed as product literacy disorder.
To sum it up all, language disorders and literacy disorders are two different types of disorders. One might want to say that a language disorder is a kind of systemic deficiency in the language, while a literacy disorder is a specific kind of process or product deficiency in reading, writing or both.
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