Grammatical knowledge of third grade good and poor readers

Abstract

The relationship between grammatical knowledge and reading ability in third grade good and poor readers was investigated. Two aspects of grammar – binding and control – were assessed to determine whether poor readers had syntactic deficits. These principles both relate to the interpretation of pronominal elements. Interpretations were assessed through a sentence–picture matching task in which picture depictions of all the possible interpretations of pronominal elements in verbally presented sentences were included. The only sentence type that differentiated the two reading groups was performance on sentences related to one of the binding principles, Principle B. Since obedience to Principle B probably involves pragmatic as well as syntactic principles, this finding suggests another way that good readers may differ from poor readers.

The comprehension of Italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with Specific Language Impairment

“…Syntactic deficits have been observed in children with DD. For instance, Waltzman and Cairns (2000) observed that 8-year-old children with DD have problems applying principle B in pronoun interpretation; Joanisse and colleagues (Joanisse et al 2000) describe problems with English -ed past verb marking and -s plural marking and a number of studies, with both behavioral tasks (Rispens, Roeleven & Koster 2004;Rispens & Been 2007) and neurophysiological measures (Cantiani et al 2015), report problems in the processing of spoken sentences displaying subject verb agreement errors. Concerning complex syntactic structures, children with DD have manifested problems with object control adjectival constructions, where they tend to erroneously interpret an overt subject as the underlying subject of the embedded verb (though-constructions: This bird is easy to bite; Byrne 1981); 6 moreover, studies have shown mild problems in the comprehension of passive sentences and complex conjunct sentences in Hebrew (Leikin & Assayag-Bouskila 2004) and in Italian ( Reggiani 2010).…”

Sensitivity to subject–verb agreement in spoken language in children with developmental dyslexia

“…In tests of more specific linguistic operations, auditory comprehension of syntactically complex sentences (passives and relative clauses) has been found to be affected in dyslexia (Bar-Shalom, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1993;Byrne, 1981;Crain & Shankweiler, 1990;Mann, Shankweiler, & Smith, 1984;Shankweiler et al, 1995;Smith, Macaruso, Shankweiler, & Crain, 1989). Waltzman and Cairns (2000) reported that poor readers differed from normal readers on sentences in which the comprehension of pronouns was related to principle B of binding theory. Evidence of inflectional verb morphology skills comes from Joanisse, Manis, Keating, and Seidenberg, (2000) who demonstrated impaired past tense marking in dyslexic readers.…”

On the comprehension and production of passive sentences and relative clauses by Italian university students with dyslexia

“…In addition to difficulties with reading, spelling, and writing, subjects with dyslexia also perform lower than controls in tasks investigating oral language production and comprehension of properties which belong to the morpho-syntax domain. In particular, they find it difficult to deal with relative clauses ( Bar-Shalom et al 1993;Mann et al 1984;Stein et al 1984;Smith et al 1989;Wiseheart et al 2009), binding principles (Waltzman & Cairns 2000;Fiorin 2010), morphosyntactic agreement (Wilsenach 2006), and passive sentences (Reggiani 2010;Wiseheart et al 2009). Low memory resources are claimed to be the main cause of the difficulties that subjects with dyslexia show with these different morpho-syntactic properties.…”