The relationship between phonological coding, syntactic awareness, and semantic processing in reading disabled and normally achieving children who were born prematurely

grantor: University of TorontoThis study examined phonological, semantic, and syntactic processes, from three to seven years, in a group children who were born prematurely. More specifically, the study explored the development of these language processes before the children were exposed to reading instruction. The children were divided into four groups at 7 years: reading disabled with average and low syntactic awareness (RD/NS and RD/LS), and normally achieving readers with average and low syntactic awareness (NA/NS, NA/LS). In addition to phonological and syntactic measures, tests of reading and listening comprehension were administered. To assess comprehension and syntactic skills, the Stanford Binet Memory for Sentences test was divided into six grammatical categories. The transformations into semantically and syntactically correct, as well as semantically correct, but syntactically incorrect, syntactic errors, and complex pronominal relations were examined. The study found that the NA/NS and NA/LS obtained significantly higher scores than the RD/NS and RD/LS on word reading, word attack, and reading comprehension at seven years, showing that syntactic awareness did not have an impact on word reading and comprehension. Significant differences were not found between the groups in the sentence transformations, therefore, subsequent analyses included only the RD and NA. The RD and NA did not differ on their semantically and syntactically correct transformations. However, the RD made significantly more syntactic errors that included sentence fragments at four years and subject-verb agreement errors at five. In multiple regression models, phonological coding was the variable that most consistently contributed to the unique variance in oral cloze, word reading, word attack, and working memory at seven years. Phonological coding and syntactic awareness tasks did not contribute to the unique variance in reading and listening comprehension tasks. This study found that phonological coding limitations had a significant impact on verbatim recall. The reading disabled children by-passed limitations in phonological coding, and syntactic weaknesses, to access higher level inferencing processes that permitted the comprehension and transformation of orally presented sentences with very complex syntactic constructions.Ph.D