Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T09:21:46.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A comparison of comprehension and production abilities of good and poor readers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Eva G. Bar-Shalom ,
Stephen Crain  and
Donald Shankweiler
Eva G. Bar-Shalom*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, Storrs
Stephen Crain*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories
Donald Shankweiler*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories
*
Eva Bar-Shalom, 249 Wormwood Hill Rd., Mansfield Center, CT 06250
Eva Bar-Shalom, 249 Wormwood Hill Rd., Mansfield Center, CT 06250
Eva Bar-Shalom, 249 Wormwood Hill Rd., Mansfield Center, CT 06250
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Research from several sources indicates that reading disability is often associated with difficulty in comprehending some complex spoken sentences, including those with relative clauses. The present study exploits a new methodology, elicited production, to identify the source of comprehension difficulties of poor readers. Both the elicited production task and a conventional act-out task were employed in a study of 30 children (aged 7-8), who were selected for reading ability. On the act-out task, the poor readers displayed a high error rate on two relative clause structures (SO and OO relatives), as had been found by Mann, Shankweiler, and Smith (1984), but these structures were elicited from the poor readers as successfully as from the good readers (on more than 80% of trials).

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 197 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Altmann, J., & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition, 30, 191–238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Amidon, A., & Carey, P. (1972). Why five-year-olds cannot understand before and after. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 417–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anastasi, A. (1968). Psychological testing (3rd ed.).New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Barret, T. C. (1965). Visual discrimination tasks as predictors of first grade reading achievement. Reading Teacher, 18, 276–282.Google Scholar
Bever, T. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, J. R. (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Birch, H., & Belmont, A. (1964). Auditory-visual integration in normal and retarded readers. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 34, 852–861.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Borer, H., & Wexler, K. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In Roeper, T. & Williams, E. (Eds.), Parameter setting. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel.Google Scholar
Bouma, H., &Legein, C. P. (1981). Visual recognition experiments in dyslexia. In Pavlides, G. T. H. & Miles, T. R. (Eds.), Dyslexia research and its applications to education. London: Wiley.Google Scholar
Brady, S., Shankweiler, D., & Mann, V. (1983). Speech perception and memory coding in relation to reading ability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 35, 345–367.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bryant, P., & Bradley, L. (1985). Children's reading problems. New York: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bryden, M. P. (1972). Auditory-visual and sequential-spatial matching in relation to readingability. Child Development, 43, 824–832.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byrne, B. (1981). Deficient syntactic control in poor readers: Is a weak phonetic memory responsible? Applied Psycholinguistics, 2, 201–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, P., & Just, P. (1988). The role of working memory in language comprehension. In Klahr, D. & Kotovsky, K. (Eds.), Complex information processing: The impact of Herbert A. Simon. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Chall, J. S. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Chapman, R., & Miller, J. (1975). Word order in early two and three word utterances: Does production precede comprehension? Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 18, 346–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, C. S. (1969). The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding: The Pisa lectures. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V., & Garnica, O. K. (1974). Is he coming or going? On the acquisition of deictic verbs. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 15, 559–572.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cossu, G., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I. G., Tola, G., & Katz, L. (1987). Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children. In Status report on speech research (pp. 95–103). New Haven, CT: Haskins Laboratories.Google Scholar
Crain, S. (1982). Temporal terms: Mastery by age five. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 21, 33–38.Google Scholar
Crain, S. (1987). On performability: Structure and process in language understanding. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 1, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S. (1989, September). Why production precedes comprehension.Paper presented at the 14th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Crain, S. (1991). Language acquisition in the absence of experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14, 597–650.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., & Fodor, J. O. (in press). Competence and performance in child language. In Language and Cognition: A Developmental Perspective, Proceedings of the Tel-Aviv Fifth Annual Workshop in Human Development and Education.Google Scholar
Crain, S. & McKee, C. (1985). Acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In Proceedings of the North Eastern Linguistic Society, 16.Amherst, MA:University of Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Crain, S., & Nakayama, M. (1987). Structure-dependence in grammar formation. Language, 63, 522–543.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S. & Ni, W. (1991). Parsermony. In Current Issues in Natural Language Processing: Conference Proceedings.Austin, TX:Center of Cognitive Science at the University of Texas.Google Scholar
Crain, S., & Shankweiler, D. (1988). Syntactic complexity and reading acquisition. In Davidson, A. & Green, G. M. (Eds.), Linguistic complexity and text comprehension: Readability issues reconsidered (pp. 167–192). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Crain, S. & Shankweiler, D. (1990). Explaining failures in spoken language comprehension by children with reading disabilities. In Balota, D., Flores d'Arcais, G. B., & Rayner, K. (Eds.), Comprehension processes in reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Shankweiler, D., Macaruso, P., & Bar-Shalom, E. (1990). Working memory and sentence comprehension: Investigations of children with reading disorder. In Vallar, G. & Shallice, T. (eds.), Impairments of short-term memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crain, S., & Steedman, M. (1985). On not being led up the garden path: The use of context by the psychological syntax processor. In Dowty, D. R., Karttunen, L., & Zwicky, A. (Eds.), Natural language parsing: Psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives (pp. 320–358). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1991). Recharting the course of language acquisition: Studies in elicited production. In Krasnegor, N., Rumbaugh, D., Schiefelbusch, R., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (Eds.), Biobehavioral foundations of language development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Thornton, R., & Murasugi, K. (1987). Capturing the evasive passive.Paper presented at the 12th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Cromer, R. F. (1970). “Children are nice to understand”: Surface structure clues for recovery of a deep structure. British Journal of Psychology, 397–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daneman, M., & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). Individual differences in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 450–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denckla, M. B., & Rudel, R. G. (1976). Naming of object-drawings by dyslexic and other learning disabled children. Brain and Language, 3, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Villiers, J. G.Tager-Flusberg, H. B. T., Hakuta, K., & Cohen, M. (1979). Children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 8, 499–518.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunn, L., & Dunn, L. (1981). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test - Revised. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Fletcher, J. M., Satz, P., & Scholes, R. (1981). Developmental changes in the linguistic performance correlates of reading achievement. Brain and Language, 13, 78–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. A., Bever, T., & Garrett, M. (1974). The psychology of language. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Ford, M. (1983). A method for obtaining measures of local parsing complexity throughout sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 203–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, A. (1988). Grammatically judgements and reading skill in grade 2. Annals of Dyslexia, 38, 73–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goodluck, H., & Tavakolian, S. (1982). Competence and processing in children's grammar of relative clauses. Cognition, 11, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gough, P., & Hillinger, M. (1980). Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 179–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grodzinsky, Y. (1987). Theoretical perspectives on language deficits. Ph.D. dissertation, Tel-Aviv University.Google Scholar
Hamburger, H., & Crain, S. (1982). Relative acquisition. In Kuczaj, S. (Ed.), Language development: Vol. 1. Syntax and semantics. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hamburger, H., & Crain, S. (1984). Acquisition of cognitive compiling. Cognition, 17, 85–136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hamburger, H., & Crain, S. (1987). Plans and semantics in human processing of language. Cognitive Science, II, 101–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hsu, J. R. (1981). The development of structural principles related to complement subject interpretation. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York.Google Scholar
Jansky, J., & de Hirsch, K. (1972). Preventing reading failure. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. L. (1975). The meaning of before and after for preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 19, 88–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jorm, A. (1979). The cognitive and neurological basis of developmental dyslexia: A theoretical framework and review. Cognition, 17, 85–136.Google Scholar
Katz, R. B. (1985). Phonological deficiencies in children with reading disability: Evidence from an object-naming task. Cognition, 22, 225–257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8, 339–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liberman, A. M., Mattingly, I. G., & Turvey, M. T. (1972). Language codes and memory codes. In Melton, A. W. & Martin, E. (Eds.), Coding processes and human memory. Washington, DC: Winston & Sons.Google Scholar
Liberman, I. Y., & Shankweiler, D. (1985). Phonology and the special problem's of learning to read and write. Remedial and Special Education, 6, 8–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F. W., & Carter, B. (1974). Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18, 201–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, A. M., Fowler, C., & Fischer, F. W. (1977). Phonetic segmentation and recoding in the beginning reader. In Reber, A. S. & Scarborough, D. L. (Eds.), Toward a psychology of reading: The proceedings of the CUNY conferences.Hillsdale, NJ:Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Mann, V. A., & Welferman, M. (1982). Children's memory for recurring linguistic and non-linguistic material in relation to reading ability. Cortex, 18, 367–375.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linebarger, M. C, Schwartz, M., & Saffran, E. (1983). Sensitivity to grammatical structure in so-called agrammatic aphasics. Cognition, 13, 361–393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lundberg, I., Oloffson, A., & Wall, S. (1980). Reading and spelling skills in the first years predicted from phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 21, 159–173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macaruso, P., Bar-Shalom, E., Crain, S., & Shankweiler, D. (1989). Comprehension of temporal terms by good and poor readers. Language and Speech, 32 (1), 45–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mann, V. A. (1984). Longitudinal prediction and prevention of reading difficulty. Annals of Dyslexia, 34, 117–136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mann, V. A., Liberman, I. Y., & Shankweiler, D. (1980). Children's memory for sentences and word strings in relation to reading ability. Memory and Cognition, 8, 329–335.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mann, V. A., Shankweiler, D., & Smith, S. T. (1984). The association between comprehension of spoken sentences and early reading ability: The role of phonetic representation. Journal of Child Language, 11, 627–643.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marlsen-Wilson, W., & Tyler, L. (1980). The temporal structure of spoken language understanding. Cognition, 8, 1–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mattingly, I. G., & Liberman, A. M. (1988). Specialized perceiving systems for speech and other biologically significant sounds. In Edelman, G. M., Gall, W. E., & Cowan, W. M. (Eds.), Auditory function: The neurobiologies bases of hearing. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Morais, J., Cary, L., Alegria, J., & Bertelson, P. (1979). Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phonemes arise spontaneously? Cognition, 1, 323–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morais, J., Cluytens, M., & Alegria, J. (1984), Segmentation abilities of dyslexics and normal readers. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 58, 221–222.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ni, W., & Crain, S. (1990). How to resolve structural ambiguities. In Proceedings of the North Eastern Linguistic Society,20.Google Scholar
Olson, R. K., Davidson, B. J., Kliegl, R., & Davies, S. E. (1984). Development of phonetic memory in disabled and normal readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 37, 187–206.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perfetti, C. A. (1985). Reading ability. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perfetti, C. A., & Hogaboam, T. (1975). The relationship between single word decoding and reading comprehension skill. Journal of Educational Psychology, 67, 461–469.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perfetti, C. A., & Lesgold, A. M. (1977). Discourse comprehension and sources of individual differences. In Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (Eds.), Cognitive processes in comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Reinhart, T. (1976). The syntactic domain of anaphora Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Richards, M. M. (1976). Come and go reconsidered: Children's use of deictic verbs in contrived situations. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 15, 655–665.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, E., & DiBenedetto, B. (1986). Decoding Skills Test Parkton, MD: New York Press.Google Scholar
Rosenbaum, P. S. (1967). The grammar of English predicate construction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sarma, J. (1991). The acquisition of wh- questions in English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, Stores.Google Scholar
Shankweiler, D. (1989). How problems in comprehension are related to difficulties in decoding. In Shankweiler, D. & Liberman, I. (Eds.), Phonology and reading disability: Solving the reading puzzle. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shankweiler, D., & Crain, S. (1986). Language mechanisms and reading disorder: A modular approach. Cognition, 24, 139–168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shankweiler, D., Crain, S., Gorell, P., & Tuller, B. (1989). Reception of language in Broca's aphasia. Language and Cognitive Processes, 4, 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, I. Y. (1972). Misreading: A search for causes. In Kavanagh, S. F. & Mattingly, I. G. (Eds.), Language by ear and eye: The relationships between speech and reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I. Y., Mark, L. S., Fowler, C. A., & Fisher, F. W. (1979). The speech code and learning to read. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 531–454.Google Scholar
Shankweiler, D., Smith, S. T., & Mann, V. A. (1984). Repetition and comprehension of spoken sentences by reading-disabled children. Brain and Language, 23, 241–257.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 272–281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, S., Macaruso, P., Shankweiler, D., & Crain, S. (1989). Syntactic comprehension in young poor readers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 429–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. (1982). Individual differences on the cognitive process of reading: II. Text-level processes. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 15, 549–554.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, C. L., Cairns, H. S., & Zurif, E. B. (1984). Sentence comprehension limitations related to syntactic deficits in reading-disabled children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 5, 305–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tavakolian, S. L. (1981). The conjoined-clause analysis of relative clauses. In Tavakolian, S. (Ed.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Thornton, R. (1990). Adventures in long-distance movement: The acquisition of complex wh-questions. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, Storrs.Google Scholar
Vallar, G., & Baddeley, A. D. (1984). Phonological short-term store, phonological processing, and sentence comprehension: Neuropsychological case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 1, 121–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vellutino, F. (1979). Dyslexia: Theory and research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Vogel, S. A. (1975). Syntactic abilities in normal and dyslexic children. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. K., & Torgesen, J. K. (1987). The nature of phonological processing and its role in the acquisition of reading skills. Psychological Bulletin, 101, 192–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wanner, E., & Maratsos, M. (1978). An ATN approach to comprehension. In Halle, M., Bresnan, J., & Miller, G. (Eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (1955). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. New York: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Whitaker, H. (1976). A case of the isolation of the language function. In Whitaker, H., & Whitaker, H. A. (Eds.), Studies in neurolinguistics (Vol. 2). New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Wolf, M. (1981). The word-retrieval process and reading in children and aphasics. In Nelson, K. (Ed.), Children's language, 3. New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar