Syntax and reading comprehension: a meta‐analysis of different spoken‐syntax assessments

Abstract

The results of this meta-analysis confirmed that the type of spoken-syntax assessment, whether norm-referenced or researcher-created, did not explain why some researchers reported that there were no significant differences between children with average and below-average reading comprehension, but the syntax construct, awareness or knowledge, did. Thus, when selecting how to measure syntax among school-age children, researchers and practitioners should evaluate whether they are measuring children's awareness of spoken syntax or knowledge of spoken syntax. Other differences, such as participant diagnosis and the format of items on the spoken-syntax assessments, also were discussed as possible explanations for why researchers found that children with average and below-average reading comprehension did not score significantly differently on spoken-syntax assessments.

Informing the Science of Reading: Students’ Awareness of Sentence‐Level Information Is Important for Reading Comprehension

“…Whereas a handful of meta‐analyses has investigated the relation between oral language and reading comprehension (e.g., Rogde, Hagen, Melby‐Lervåg, & Lervåg, 2019; Silverman et al, 2020), there has been only one published meta‐analysis on syntactic skills and reading comprehension. Brimo, Lund, and Sapp (2018) identified studies that compared syntactic skills of students with poor reading comprehension against those of typically developing students. Collating across the 14 studies identified, there was evidence of stronger performance on syntactic comprehension for students with good reading comprehension in comparison with those with poor reading comprehension; there were no such differences for syntactic awareness.…”

The Contributions of Language Skills and Comprehension Monitoring to Chinese Reading Comprehension: A Longitudinal Investigation

“…Specifically, language skills, including phonological knowledge, morphological knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and orthographic knowledge, are important word-level skills in the process of building surface structure (Ehri, 2014;Quinn et al, 2015;Xie and Wu, 2019;Liu and Liu, 2020). In the textbase representation process, the language skill of syntactic knowledge is essential as it helps readers to group words, trace the logical and semantic relations among linguistic constituents, and build initial propositions (So and Siegel, 1997;Cheung et al, 2007;Brimo et al, 2018;Simpson et al, 2020). In the situation model construction process, cognitive skills, such as comprehension monitoring and inference making, are necessary to detect internal and external inconsistences and draw inferences (Cain et al, 2004;Connor et al, 2015;Oakhill et al, 2015;Wong et al, 2017).…”

Syntax Comprehension in 4-6 Year Old Foster Children

“…Syntax is a language skill designated for supporting children's reading comprehension. Nevertheless, studies examining the children having average and below-average reading comprehension scores report inconsistent findings (Brimo et al, 2018). To the best of our knowledge, no Persian study has specifically investigated syntax comprehension of orphans.…”