Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed.…

Using a word order correction paradigm, this study assessed syntactic awareness skills in children with good and poor reading comprehension, matched for age, decoding skill, and nonverbal ability. Poor comprehenders performed less well than normal readers, and the performance of both groups was influenced by the syntactic complexity and semantic…

This study tested the comprehension of object-control adjectives in second-grade good and poor readers using both an act-out task and a sentence-picture matching task. Contrary to an earlier study, significant group differences were not found in interpreting object control adjectives with either task. (Contains 20 references.) (JL)

Assessed a large sample of twins between the ages of 7 and 13 years on language comprehension tests sensitive to grammatical specific language impairment (G-SLI), including 37 same-sex twin pairs selected for presence of language impairment and 104 pairs from the general population. Qualitative markers of G-SLI were derived from the tests.…

Deaf students' recognition of indefinite pronouns and quantifiers was tested using written materials in the form of comic strips. The subjects were 187 profoundly hearing-impaired students, aged 7 to 23 years. Findings showed significant developmental trends for both forms. Quantifiers were found to be significantly more difficult than indefinite…

Examines differences in language ability between normally achieving students and learning-disabled students with reading comprehension problems. Poor comprehending students differed from normal achievers for all language measures and in the manner that reader- and text-related variables predicted comprehension. Results supported the positive role…

Examines the source of poor readers' comprehension failures in spoken sentences containing complex syntactic structures. Although research literature indicates that the difficulties poor readers display are usually associated with some aspect of phonological processing, other components of language processing may be involved. (58 references)…