Ifigeneia Dosi*, Eirini-Chrysovalantou Koutsipetsidou**
Democritus University of Thrace*
Queen Margaret University of Edinburgh**

The aim of the present study is twofold: (a) to examine linguistic and cognitive abilities in Greek-speaking children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) or Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), and (b) to detect whether the performance on Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) is affected by (verbal) working memory (WM) abilities.Previous studies have indicated that children with bothDLDand DD have lower linguistic and WMabilitiesin comparison to their peers. More recent studies focus on the interaction of these two abilities, indicating that the linguistic deficit is driven by the cognitive deficit. Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) isan appropriate and reliable tool for measuring both linguistic and cognitive abilities. For this reason, we tested 30 monolingual children (with DD, DLD and non-impaired controls) by means of an SRTand a verbal working memorytask(VWMT). The results have shown that both clinical groups had lower linguistic and cognitive abilitiesthan the control group; however the DLD group show a lower performance on the SRTboth in terms of accuracy and grammaticality in comparison to the DD group.Interestingly,we found that theperformanceon the VWMT predicts the accuracy on the SRT, while lexical knowledge predicts thegrammaticalityscores in both clinical groups, albeit not in the control group.From our findings we deduce that(a) both clinical groups have impaired linguistic and cognitive abilities; however the DLD group encounters more difficulties withtheir linguistic abilities and (b) SRT measures both morphosyntactic abilitiesand WM abilities, as different predictor variables have a different impact on participants’performance.