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Syntactic awareness and reading ability: is there any evidence for a special relationship?

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>28/09/2007
<mark>Journal</mark>Applied Psycholinguistics
Issue number4
Volume28
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)679-694
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension (Tunmer & Bowey, 1984). The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in eight- and ten-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed. After vocabulary, memory explained variance on the word-order correction task; in contrast grammatical knowledge explained performance on the grammatical correction task. The relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension was mediated by vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory; in contrast, word reading and syntactic awareness shared unique variance not explained by these controls. The implications for how we measure syntactic awareness and its relation with reading ability are discussed.