No abstract

Objectives:Writing is an important function used in daily activities and it is critical for the achievement in all learning areas. Thus, this study on the writing ability in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has its importance. Methods: 16 children with ADHD and 16 normal children without from 3 to 4 grades at the elementary school participated in the study. The experiment was to listen to familiar and non-familiar stories, and then to write stories about what children have perceived in order to compare the performances of children with ADHD to that of the normal children. Results: Children with ADHD recalled the story units less than normal children and showed difficulties in writing complete episode of non-familiar conditions. When analyzing the ability of story composition, children with ADHD made poorer performance, as compared to normal children regardless of the familiarity of the story. However, there were differences in the sub-elements which showed poor performances under each condition. The average number of clauses per C-unit has no significant difference between the two groups, but both groups used the complex syntax in a non-familiar condition. And children with ADHD made sentences with syntactic errors and spelling errors more significantly than normal children under both conditions. Conclusion: Children with ADHD showed lower performances than normal children in both the quantity and the quality of writing and the former group was more affected by the familiarity of the story than the latter. Regardless of the story's familiarity, children with ADHD proved to have more syntactic errors and spelling errors than the normal children.

Objectives: Previous studies have reported that children with poor reading show deficiencies in their ability to suppress unnecessary information during reading; however, most studies have used homonym tasks to prove this. Accordingly, we tried to look into the semantic processing characteristics of children with poor reading in sentence-level processing to expand the results of precedent studies away from the homonym task paradigm. Methods: 11 children with poor reading and 12 typical children in 3-6 grade participated. They conducted the grammaticality judgment task to judge whether there were any grammatical errors in the presented sentences. At that time, we recorded reaction accuracy and reaction time. The grammaticality judgment task was divided into the semantic-related condition and the semantic-unrelated condition according to the meaning connection intensity of two words in the sentences. Results: In response accuracy, both children with poor reading and typical children performed lower in the semantic-unrelated condition than in the semantic-related condition, but there were no significant differences in the performance of the two groups. In response time, children with poor reading overall took longer to judge grammaticality than typical children, and notably spent more time reacting in the semantic-unrelated condition than the semantic-related condition. Conclusion: Children with poor reading have difficulties suppressing unnecessarily active information compared to typical children. This tendency to allocate cognitive resources to unnecessary information when they read could ultimately be one of the factors that cause them to fail to comprehend reading.

Objectives: The context in which a particular word is used includes clues to the phonological, morphological, and semantic knowledge of the word. When an unknown word appears in the process of reading the text, the ability to infer its meaning by using context is required to comprehend the text well. The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference between poor comprehenders and typical children when inferring the meaning of words. Methods: Fifteen poor comprehenders and 15 typical children in the 3rd and 4th grade participated in this study. The sentence judgment task was divided into word condition and non-word condition, and each item consisted of a proceeding sentence and a following sentence. In order to perform the sentence judgment task, after reading the proceeding sentence in which the target word was appropriately used, children were asked to judge whether the target word in the following sentence was used appropriately. Results: Both poor comprehenders and typical children had difficulty in judging whether the meaning of the target word was appropriately used in the non-word condition when compared to the word condition. Poor comprehenders showed poorer performance than typical children in both the word and non-word conditions. Conclusion: Although poor comprehenders showed similar patterns as the typical children, they had difficulty inferring the meaning of the words. This may be associated with a lack of vocabulary knowledge, ineffectiveness of semantic connection and retrieval, and a deficit of metalinguistic ability.

No abstract