Research has been undertaken on reading in languages with an opaque orthography. The orthography of the language being read influences the ease with which a child learns to read. Age differences were also investigated, demonstrating larger span impairment in older children with SLD than in younger.īackground: Phonological awareness (PA) skills and working memory (WM) are universally regarded as crucial precursors to skilled reading. This pattern was similar for different SLD profiles with clinical diagnoses of dyslexia and mixed disorder, but the impairments were more severe in the latter. Despite a GAI within normal range, children with SLD had difficulty with both digit span tasks, but more so for forward span. The correlation of the two spans with a General Ability Index (GAI) was similar in SLD, and smaller in magnitude than in typically developing children. Our results further support the hypothesis that the intellectual difficulties of children with SLD involve working memory in the forward digit span task to a greater extent than in the backward digit span task. This study examined performance in the forward and backward digit span task of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) in a large group of children with specific learning disorder (SLD) as compared with a group of typically developing children matched for age and sex.