Abstracts - Earli

levels of academic achievement at the end of formal education and increased risk ofunemployment in adult life. The current study addresses these issues by 1) examining theacademic and literacy attainments of children with a history of specific language andcommunication difficulties at the end of compulsory education (age 16) in the UK 2) by describingtheir post sixteen destinations in relation to further studies and work and 3) examining the extent towhich early cognitive, language and literacy scores predict educational achievements. The data arederived from a longitudinal study of a cohort of children identified as experiencing a specificlanguage impairment at the age of 8 (Dockrell et al., in press; Lindsay et al, 2000). Participants: Acohort of 69 children identified with a specific language impairment at age 8 were followedthrough elementary school and High school. Participants subsequently completed standardisedassessments of language, reading, spelling and writing at ages 10, 14 and 16. Results: Theparticipants continued to experience problems with oral language and language levels weresignificantly poorer than nonverbal skills. The majority of participants achieved some level ofsuccess in national exams at the end of formal education . Both levels of writing and numeracyskills were significant predictors of performance. The majority of young people continued intofurther education. Conclusion: This study extends our understanding of the long term impact ofearly specific speech and language difficulties. Early oral language difficulties are later manifestedas literacy problems. These difficulties are a barrier to later academic success.Decoding and spelling errors of secondary students with learning disabilitiesSouzana Padeliadu, University of Thessaly, GreeceFaye Antoniou, University of Thessaly, GreeceThe purpose of the present study was to document the errors secondary school students emit indecoding and spelling. Participants were 55 students, diagnosed as having LD using Stateidentificationcriteria. The decoding tasks involved reading aloud an equal number of words andpseudowords (N=25 each) which were presented interchangeably and in order of ascendingdifficulty. Students’ errors were coded as addition, substitution, omission, reversal (separately forphonemes and syllables) and stress ones. Spelling was evaluated by writing 76 words (read by theexaminer as part of a sentence). The errors were coded as phonological, historical, morphological,and stress ones. Results indicated that (a) the most frequent decoding errors involved phoneme andsyllable substitution and stress errors, and (b) the most to least frequent spelling errors involvedstress, morphological type errors, historical spelling, and spelling errors of phonological type.When regressing spelling on decoding, the linear combination of the latter explained variancelevels between 13% and 31%. It is concluded that spelling has a strong decoding basis and thatthose errors seem to persist in adolescence. Thus, at the secondary school level, teachers need toevaluate and monitor the basic/prerequisite skills of reading and spelling.– 557 –