BACKGROUND: The current study aims at better characterizing the role of reading skills as a predictor of comprehension of relative clauses. Well-established cross-linguistic evidence shows that children are more accurate in the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in comparison to the object-extracted counterpart. Children with reading difficulties are known to perform less accurately on object relatives at the group level compared to typically developing children. Given that children's performance on reading tasks is shown to shape as a continuum, in the current study we attempted to use reading skills as a continuous variable to predict performance on relative clauses. METHODS: We examined the comprehension of relative clauses in a group of 30 English children (7-11 years) with varying levels of reading skills. Reading skills varied on a large spectrum, from poor readers to very skilled readers, as assessed by the YARC standardized test. The experimental task consisted of a picture-matching task. Children were presented with subject and object relative clauses and they were asked to choose one picture - out of four - that would best represent the sentence they heard. At the same time, we manipulated whether the subject and object nouns were either matching (both singular or both plural) or mismatching (one singular, the other plural) in number. RESULTS: Our analysis of accuracy shows that subject relatives were comprehended more accurately overall than object relatives, that responses to sentences with noun phrases mismatching in number were more accurate overall than the ones with matching noun phrases and that performance improved as a function of reading skills. Within the match subset, while the difference in accuracy between subject and object relatives is large in poor readers, the difference is reduced with better reading skills, almost disappearing in very skilled readers. DISCUSSION: Beside replicating the well-established findings on the subject-object asymmetry, number facilitation in the comprehension of relative clauses, and a better overall performance by skilled readers, these results indicate that strong reading skills may determine a reduction of the processing difficulty associated with the hardest object relative clause condition (i.e., match), causing a reduction of the subject-object asymmetry.

Department of Education and Psychology Free University of Berlin Berlin Germany

Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics University of Cambridge Cambridge United Kingdom

Faculty of Arts Charles University Prague Czechia

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Adani F., Forgiarini M., Guasti M. T., Van Der Lely H. K. (2014). Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (grammatical) specific language impairment. J. Child Lang. 41 811–841. 10.1017/S0305000913000184 PubMed DOI PMC

Adani F., Stegenwallner-Schütz M., Niesel T. (2017). The peaceful co-existence of input frequency and structural intervention effects on the comprehension of complex sentences in german-speaking children. Front. Psychol. 8:1590. 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01590 PubMed DOI PMC

Allen L., Cipielewski J., Stanovich K. E. (1992). Multiple indicators of children’s reading habits and attitudes: construct validity and cognitive correlates. J. Educ. Psychol. 84:489 10.1037/0022-0663.84.4.489 DOI

Arosio F., Guasti M. T., Stucchi N. (2011). Disambiguating information and memory resources in children’s processing of italian relative clauses. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 40 137–154. 10.1007/s10936-010-9160-0 PubMed DOI

Arosio F., Panzeri F., Molteni B., Magazù S., Guasti M. T. (2017). The comprehension of italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with specific language impairment. Glossa J. Gen. Linguist. 2:9.

Baayen R. H., Davidson D. J., Bates D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. J. Mem. Lang. 59 390–412. 10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005 DOI

Bar-Shalom E. G., Crain S., Shankweiler D. (1993). A comparison of comprehension and production abilities of good and poor readers. Appl. Psycholinguist. 14 197–227. 10.1017/s0142716400009553 DOI

Bates D., Maechler M., Bolker B., Walker S., Christensen R. H. B., Singmann H., et al. (2015). Package ‘lme4’. Convergence 12 1–113.

Betancort M., Carreiras M., Sturt P. (2009). The processing of subject and object relative clauses in spanish: an eye-tracking study. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 62 1915–1929. 10.1080/17470210902866672 PubMed DOI

Brown H. (1972). Children’s comprehension of relativised english sentences. Child Dev. 42 1923–1936. 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1971.tb03780.x DOI

Cain K. (2007). Syntactic awareness and reading ability: is there any evidence for a special relationship? Appl. Psycholinguist. 28 679–694. 10.1017/s0142716407070361 DOI

Cain K., Oakhill J., Bryant P. (2004). Children’s reading comprehension ability: concurrent prediction by working memory, verbal ability, and component skills. J. Educ. Psychol. 96 31–42. 10.1037/0022-0663.96.1.31 DOI

Cantiani C., Lorusso M. L., Guasti M. T., Sabisch B., Männel C. (2013). Characterizing the morphosyntactic processing deficit and its relationship to phonology in developmental dyslexia. Neuropsychologia 51 1595–1607. 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.04.009 PubMed DOI

Casalis S., Leuwers C., Hilton H. (2013). Syntactic comprehension in reading and listening: a study with French children with dyslexia. J. Learn. Disabil. 46 210–219. 10.1177/0022219412449423 PubMed DOI

Cilibrasi L., Stojanovik V., Riddell P., Saddy D. (2019). Sensitivity to inflectional morphemes in the absence of meaning: evidence from a novel task. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 48 747–767. 10.1007/s10936-019-09629-y PubMed DOI PMC

Contemori C., Belletti A. (2014). Relatives and passive object relatives in italian-speaking children and adults: intervention in production and comprehension. Appl. Psycholinguist. 35 1021–1053. 10.1017/s0142716412000689 DOI

Crisp J., Lambon Ralph M. A. (2006). Unlocking the nature of the phonological–deep dyslexia continuum: the keys to reading aloud are in phonology and semantics. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 18 348–362. 10.1162/jocn.2006.18.3.348 PubMed DOI

Cunningham A. E., Stanovich K. E. (1998). What reading does for the mind. Am. Educ. 22 8–17.

Dehaene S. (2009). Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How we Read. New York, NY: Penguin.

Field A. (2013). Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd.

Friedmann N., Belletti A., Rizzi L. (2009). Relativised relatives: types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119 67–88.10.1016/j.lingua.2008.09.002 DOI

Garraffa M., Grillo N. (2008). Canonicity effects as grammatical phenomena. J. Neurolinguist. 21 177–197. 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2007.09.001 DOI

Gathercole S. E., Alloway T. P., Willis C., Adams A. M. (2006). Working memory in children with reading disabilities. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 93 265–281. PubMed

Gathercole S. E., Willis C. S., Baddeley A. D., Emslie H. (1994). The children’s test of nonword repetition: a test of phonological working memory. Memory 2 103–127. 10.1080/09658219408258940 PubMed DOI

Goff D. A., Pratt C., Ong B. (2005). The relations between children’s reading comprehension, working memory, language skills and components of reading decoding in a normal sample. Read. Writ. 18 583–616. 10.1007/s11145-004-7109-0 DOI

Grillo N. (2009). Generalised minimality: feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism. Lingua 119 1426–1443. 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.04.003 DOI

Guasti M. T. (2017). Language Acquisition: The Growth of Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Heider P. M., Dery J. E., Roland D. (2014). The processing of it object relative clauses: evidence against a fine-grained frequency account. J. Mem. Lang. 75 58–76. 10.1016/j.jml.2014.05.001 DOI

Hu S., Gavarró A., Vernice M., Guasti M. T. (2016). The acquisition of chinese relative clauses: contrasting two theoretical approaches. J. Child Lang. 43 1–21. 10.1017/S0305000914000865 PubMed DOI

Jaeger T. F. (2008). categorical data analysis: away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. J. Mem. Lang. 59 434–446. 10.1016/j.jml.2007.11.007 PubMed DOI PMC

Keenan E. L., Comrie B. (1979). Data on the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy. Language 55 333–351.

Kidd E., Brandt S., Lieven E., Tomasello M. (2007). Object relatives made easy: a cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children’s processing of relative clauses. Lang. Cogn. Process. 22 860–897.10.1080/01690960601155284 DOI

Leather C. V., Henry L. A. (1994). Working memory span and phonological awareness tasks as predictors of early reading ability. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 58 88–111. 10.1006/jecp.1994.1027 PubMed DOI

Leikin M., Bouskila O. A. (2004). Expression of syntactic complexity in sentence comprehension: a comparison between dyslexic and regular readers. Read. Writ. 17 801–822. 10.1007/s11145-004-2661-1 DOI

MacDonald M. C. (2013). How language production shapes language form and comprehension. Front. Psychol. 4:226. 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00226 PubMed DOI PMC

McArthur G. M., Hogben J. H., Edwards V. T., Heath S. M., Mengler E. D. (2000). On the “specifics” of specific reading disability and specific language impairment. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 41 869–874. 10.1111/1469-7610.00674 PubMed DOI

Metz M., van Hout A., van der Lely H. (2012). Subject interpretation of object questions by dutch 5-year-olds. Linguist. Netherlands 2012 97–110. 10.1075/avt.29.08met DOI

Mokhtari K., Thompson H. B. (2006). How problems of reading fluency and comprehension are related to difficulties in syntactic awareness skills among fifth graders. Liter. Res. Instruct. 46 73–94. 10.1080/19388070609558461 DOI

Muter V., Snowling M. (1998). Concurrent and longitudinal predictors of reading: the role of metalinguistic and short-term memory skills. Read. Res. Q. 33 320–337. 10.1598/rrq.33.3.4 DOI

Nation K., Clarke P., Marshall C. M., Durand M. (2004). Hidden language impairments in children: Parallels between poor reading comprehension and specific language impairment? J. Speech Lang. Hear Res. 47 199–211. 10.1044/1092-4388(2004/017) PubMed DOI

Nation K., Snowling M. J. (2000). Factors influencing syntactic awareness skills in normal readers and poor comprehenders. Appl. Psycholinguist. 21 229–241. 10.1017/S0142716400002046 DOI

Pennington B. F. (1995). Genetics of learning disabilities. J. Child Neurol. 10 S69–S77. 10.1177/08830738950100S114 PubMed DOI

Pérez A., Joseph H. S., Bajo T., Nation K. (2016). Evaluation and revision of inferential comprehension in narrative texts: an eye movement study. Lang. Cogn. Neurosci. 31 549–566. 10.1080/23273798.2015.1115883 DOI

Purcell-Gates V. (2001). Emergent literacy is emerging knowledge of written, not oral, language. New Dir. Child Adolesc. Dev. 2001 7–22. PubMed

Raven J. C. (1998). Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Oxford: Oxford Psychologists Press.

Riches N. G., Garraffa M. (2017). A discourse account of intervention phenomena: an investigation of interrogatives. Glossa 2:74 10.5334/gjgl.100 DOI

Rizzi L. (1990). Linguistic Inquiry Monographs. Relativised Minimality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Rizzi L. (2013). Locality. Lingua 130 169–186.

Robertson E. K., Joanisse M. F. (2010). Spoken sentence comprehension in children with dyslexia and language impairment: The roles of syntax and working memory. Appl. Psycholinguist. 31 141–165. 10.1017/s0142716409990208 DOI

Roland D., Dick F., Elman J. L. (2007). Frequency of basic english grammatical structures: a corpus analysis. J. Mem. Lang. 57 348–379. 10.1016/j.jml.2007.03.002 PubMed DOI PMC

Savage R. S., Frederickson N. (2006). Beyond phonology: what else is needed to describe the problems of below-average readers and spellers? J. Learn. Disabil. 39 399–413. 10.1177/00222194060390050301 PubMed DOI

Schroeder M. A., Lander J., Levine-Silverman S. (1990). Diagnosing and dealing with multicollinearity. West. J. Nurs. Res. 12 175–187. 10.1177/019394599001200204 PubMed DOI

Sénéchal M., Pagan S., Lever R., Ouellette G. P. (2008). Relations among the frequency of shared reading and 4-year-old children’s vocabulary, morphological and syntax comprehension, and narrative skills. Early Educ. Dev. 19 27–44. 10.1080/10409280701838710 DOI

Serrano F., Defior S. (2008). Dyslexia speed problems in a transparent orthography. Ann. Dyslexia 58:81. 10.1007/s11881-008-0013-6 PubMed DOI

Snowling M. J. (2013). Early identification and interventions for dyslexia: a contemporary view. J. Res. Spec. Educ. Needs 13 7–14. 10.1111/j.1471-3802.2012.01262.x PubMed DOI PMC

Snowling M. J., Stothard S. E., Clarke P., Bowyer-Crane C., Harrington A., Truelove E., et al. (2009). YARC York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension Passage Reading. London: GL Publishers.

Theodorou E., Grohmann K. K. (2012). The acquisition of relative clauses in cypriot greek: production and comprehension. Rev. Diacrít. 26 270–299.

Tsimpli I. M. (2014). Early, late or very late: timing acquisition and bilingualism. Linguist. Approach. Bilingual. 4 283–313. 10.1075/lab.4.3.01tsi DOI

Volpato F. (2012). “The comprehension of relative clauses by hearing and hearing impaired, cochlear-implanted children: the role of marked number features,” in Proceedings of the Romance Turn IV. Workshop on the Acquisition of Romance Languages, eds Ferré S., Prévost P., Tuller L., Zebib R. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; ), 306–325.