Syntactic Awareness Skills of Poor Comprehenders and Typically Developing Children

Jeong, Miran

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2010;15(3): 337-347.

Miran Jeong^`

정미란(Miran Jeong)

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the syntactic awareness skills of poor comprehenders using a word-order task. Relative to their peers, the poor comprehenders had normal word decoding and recognition skills but delayed reading comprehension skills.
Methods
Eighty elementary school children in grades 3-6 participated in the present study. Among the participants, 40 were poor comprehenders and 40 were typically developing children. All participants were tested using a word-order task containing a variety of complex-sentence types in a total of 26 items. In order to test the developing changes in syntactic awareness skills, the children were divided into two groups: 3rd and 4th graders in the younger group and 5th and 6th graders in the older group. For whole items, a two-way ANOVA of subject group (2) x grade (2) was conducted. Additionally, for each of the three complex-sentence types that included a subordinate clause, noun-clause, adjective-clause, relative-clause, a two-way ANOVA of subject group (2) x grade (2) was conducted.
Results
For whole items, significant main effects were found for group and age. For complex-sentences embedding a noun-clause, a significant main effect was found for group only. In contrast, for complex-sentence types embedding an adjective-clause or a relative-clause, significant main effects were found for group and age.
Discussion & Conclusion
The performances of the poor comprehenders on the word-order task were interpreted in terms of their syntactic awareness skills. In addition, the importance of syntactic awareness for reading comprehension is further discussed. (Korean Journal of Communication Disorders 2010;15;337-347)