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Morphosyntax in poor comprehenders

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Abstract

Children described as poor comprehenders (PCs) have reading comprehension difficulties in spite of adequate word reading abilities. PCs are known to display weakness with semantics and higher-level aspects of oral language, but less is known about their grammatical skills, especially with regard to morphosyntax. The purpose of this study was to examine morphosyntax in fourth grade PCs and typically developing readers (TDs), using three experimental tasks involving finiteness marking. Participants also completed standardized, norm-referenced assessments of phonological memory, vocabulary, and broader language skills. PCs displayed weakness relative to TDs on all three morphosyntax tasks and on every other assessment of oral language except phonological memory, as indexed by nonword repetition. These findings help to clarify the linguistic profile of PCs, suggesting that their language weaknesses include grammatical weaknesses that cannot be fully explained by semantic factors. Because finiteness markers are usually mastered prior to formal schooling in typical development, we call for future studies to examine whether assessments of morphosyntax could be used for the early identification of children at risk for future reading comprehension difficulty.

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Notes

  1. Not all irregular past tense verbs are overtly marked for finiteness. Some irregular past tense verbs (e.g., hit, cut) are phonologically and orthographically identical to their present tense forms.

  2. Although teachers used progress-monitoring scores to distribute consent forms, the scores were not provided to the examiners for analysis in this study.

  3. Because this study examined knowledge of standard American English morphosyntax, it was not appropriate to include speakers of dialects that follow different grammatical rules, such as AAE. Therefore, audio recordings of the Recalling Sentences and Formulated Sentences subtests of the CELF-4 were checked by a trained research assistant for the presence of features of AAE. No PCs displayed these features, but one member of the TD group did and was subsequently excluded from further analyses.

  4. We note that under a different analysis, “Where do a boy like to play” could be considered an error of omission because the bare-stem form of DO is phonologically identical to the third-person singular form. DO also differs from BE because it is inserted to mark tense and agreement for the formation of questions, rather than being generated in the matrix clause and moved. The following example demonstrates this difference.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported, in part, by funds from the National Institutes of Health (DC009133), the International Reading Association, and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation. The contents of this article are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the funding agencies. This study was conducted as part of the first author’s doctoral studies at the University of Kansas, under the direction of the second author and committee members Diane Loeb, Mabel Rice, Sarah Rosen, and Holly Storkel. The authors would like to thank the students as well as parents and teachers from USD 497 and 501 for their participation in this study. Thanks to April Best, Stacy Cates, and Jennifer Shipp for assistance with standardized testing, to Jill Hoover for assistance with transcription reliability, David Hahn for assistance with picture stimulus preparation, and Steven Luke for consultation on statistical analyses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Carolina, Keenan Building, Room 330, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Suzanne M. Adlof

  2. Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Hugh W. Catts

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  1. Suzanne M. Adlof
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  2. Hugh W. Catts
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Correspondence to Suzanne M. Adlof.

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Adlof, S.M., Catts, H.W. Morphosyntax in poor comprehenders. Read Writ 28, 1051–1070 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9562-3

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