Assessing understanding of relative clauses: a comparison of multiple-choice comprehension versus sentence repetition

Abstract

A B S T R A C TAlthough sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice picture-matching sentence comprehension task and a sentence repetition task. Thirty-three typically developing children completed both assessments, which included relative clauses representing a range of syntactic roles. Results revealed a similar order of difficulty of constructions on both measures but little agreement between them when evaluating individual differences. Interestingly, repetition was the easier of the two measures, with children showing the ability to repeat sentences

The understanding of complex syntax in children with Down syndrome

“…Given the additional executive demands of multiple-choice comprehension tasks ( Frizelle et al , 2017) we anticipated that this would be the case. To test this prediction, we carried out a parallel regression analysis using the same independent variables as those previously described, but using TROG-2 raw score as the dependant variable.…”

“…As we highlighted previously, linguistic tests using these multiple-choice tasks are high in executive cognitive demands ( Frizelle et al , 2017) and likely to disadvantage those with cognitive impairment of any aetiology (including those with DS, Fragile X, Williams syndrome etc). It is plausible that the multiple-choice design lowered the performance of each of the cognitively impaired groups participating in these studies, which may have masked any potential differences in the ability of each group to understand a range of sentence structures.…”

“…The test sentences were chosen on the basis of pilot work carried out by the first author, work completed by Diessel & Tomasello (2000); Diessel & Tomasello (2005) and research by Frizelle & Fletcher (2014) and Frizelle et al (2017). Based on the British National Corpus, the sentences include high-frequency nouns and verbs.…”

“…Our previous research has shown that children's performance on language comprehension tests can be heavily influenced by task demands ( Frizelle et al , 2017). Previous studies have tended to use multiple-choice tasks that have a heavy cognitive load and make demands beyond the linguistic.…”

“…In addition, we have found that children's performance on language comprehension tests can be heavily influenced by the specific demands of the assessment method employed ( Frizelle et al , 2017). The format used in the TACL-R and TROG-2 is the traditional multiple-choice sentence picture-matching presentation, where the goal is to select from an array the picture that matches a spoken sentence.…”