Levels of Language Competence and Reading Ability: an Exploratory Investigation

Associations have been found between reading ability around the age of seven to eight years and communicative competence, indicating a stage corresponding to the Piagetian concrete operations stage. It was not known, however, whether children who lagged at that stage in learning to read and in acquiring communicative competence would eventually‘catch up’with their peers in both these areas. This paper reports an exploratory study of this issue with adults who had not learnt to read as children although they were of average intelligence, and had no obvious physical defect. The objectives were: (a) to investigate whether these adults would perform on the same level as normal reading peers on language tasks requiring communicative and analytic competence; (b) to investigate whether performance on these tasks would be related to level of vocabulary comprehension and intelligence. No significant differences were found between the groups in their performance on the tasks involving communicative competence. However, normal readers scored significantly higher in tasks requiring analytic competence or the ability to retrieve and transform verbal material. In addition, the pattern of correlations was different for the two groups, suggesting that they had undergone different courses of cognitive development. The results cannot tell us whether the ability to read, or lack of it, influenced the development of these functions or vice versa. It seems from this investigation, however, that not all functions of oral language develop to the same extent in readers and in non‐readers, and that this is not related solely to IQ.