Exploring writing products in students with language impairments and autism spectrum disorders

• We examined the written text production of pupils with Language impairment and Autistic spectrum disorders.
• Measures of transcription and text generation, but not text quality, were significantly poorer for students with LI.
• Different aspects of text production were related to oral language and socio-cognitive skills.
• Oral language measures of sentence formulation were significantly related to written measures of grammatical accuracy.

Oral language skills scaffold written text production; students with oral language difficulties often experience writing problems. The current study examines the ways in which oral language problems experienced by students with language impairment (LI) and students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) impact on their production of written text. One hundred and fifty seven participants (Mage = 10;2) with LI or ASD completed standardized measures of oral language, transcription, working memory, and nonverbal ability and produced a written narrative text assessed for productivity, grammatical accuracy, and quality. Measures of transcription, productivity, and grammatical accuracy, but not text quality, were poorer for students with LI. Transcription skills accounted for the majority of variance in the writing of the LI cohort. For the ASD cohort, handwriting, oral language and autism symptomatology were significant predictors. When students with ASD also experienced language problems, their performance was equivalent to that observed in the LI cohort.