Understanding of anaphoric relations in skilled and less skilled comprehenders

This experiment investigated comprehension of four types of anaphor (reference, ellipsis, substitution and lexical) in 7 to 8−year-old good and poor comprehenders, matched in decoding skills but differing in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders performed less well than skilled comprehenders both in identifying antecedents of anaphors in a story, and in answering questions on the text which required anaphor resolution. Both groups performed more poorly as distance between anaphor and antecedent increased, and poor comprehenders were more adversely affected by distance than good comprehenders for ellipsis. Children's errors are used to suggest differences between the groups in processes of resolving anaphors, in terms of scanning text for appropriate antecedents and integrating text with world knowledge