Probing Phonological Processing Differences in Nonword Repetition for Children with Separate or Co-occurring Dyslexia and Developmental Language Disorder.

We assessed nonword repetition (NWR) skills in 7-9 year-old children with dyslexia (dyslexia-only), developmental language disorder (DLD-only), co-occurring DLD+dyslexia, and typical development (TD) with a norm-referenced and an experimental task. The experimental task manipulated phonemic variability (dissimilarity among consonant phonemes within the nonword) and presentation modality (audio-only versus audiovisual) to probe potential phonological processing differences among the groups. Across tasks, the dyslexia-only and DLD-only groups performed similarly to each other and intermediately to the TD and DLD+dyslexia groups. In the experimental task, nonwords with low phonemic variability were produced less accurately in both modalities, and audiovisual presentation facilitated accurate repetition of low phonemic variability nonwords. A lack of a group interaction with phonemic variability or presentation modality suggests similarities, despite group differences, in how underlying phonological representations influence task performance. Overall, results suggest that poor NWR is associated with both dyslexia and DLD, and that co-occurrence compounds this difficulty.