TY - JOUR

T1 - Morphological and syntactic awareness in poor comprehenders

T2 - another piece of the puzzle

AU - Tong, Xiuli

AU - Deacon, Helene

AU - Cain, Kate

N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 47 (1), 2014, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2014 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Journal of Learning Disabilities page: http://ldx.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - Poor comprehenders have intact word reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding what they read. We investigated whether two metalinguistic skills, morphological and syntactic awareness, are specifically related to poor reading comprehension by including separate and combined measures of each. We identified poor comprehenders (n = 15) and average comprehenders (n = 15) in grade 4 who were matched on word reading accuracy and speed, vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability, and age. The two groups performed comparably on a morphological awareness task that involved both morphological and syntactic cues. However, poor comprehenders performed less well than average comprehenders on a derivational word analogy task in which there was no additional syntactic information, thus tapping only morphological awareness, and also less well on a syntactic awareness task, in which there were no morphological manipulations. Our task and participant selection process ruled out key non-metalinguistic sources of influence on these tasks. These findings suggest that the relationships among reading comprehension, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness, depend on the tasks used to measure the latter two. Future research needs to identify precisely in what ways these metalinguistic difficulties connect to challenges with reading comprehension.

AB - Poor comprehenders have intact word reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding what they read. We investigated whether two metalinguistic skills, morphological and syntactic awareness, are specifically related to poor reading comprehension by including separate and combined measures of each. We identified poor comprehenders (n = 15) and average comprehenders (n = 15) in grade 4 who were matched on word reading accuracy and speed, vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability, and age. The two groups performed comparably on a morphological awareness task that involved both morphological and syntactic cues. However, poor comprehenders performed less well than average comprehenders on a derivational word analogy task in which there was no additional syntactic information, thus tapping only morphological awareness, and also less well on a syntactic awareness task, in which there were no morphological manipulations. Our task and participant selection process ruled out key non-metalinguistic sources of influence on these tasks. These findings suggest that the relationships among reading comprehension, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness, depend on the tasks used to measure the latter two. Future research needs to identify precisely in what ways these metalinguistic difficulties connect to challenges with reading comprehension.

KW - metalinguistic awareness

KW - morphological awareness

KW - syntactic awareness

KW - poor comprehenders

KW - reading comprehension

U2 - 10.1177/0022219413509971

DO - 10.1177/0022219413509971

M3 - Journal article

VL - 47

SP - 22

EP - 33

JO - Journal of Learning Disabilities

JF - Journal of Learning Disabilities

SN - 0022-2194

IS - 1

ER -