Contribution of discourse and morphosyntax skills to reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic and typically developing children

Abstract

This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system.

Weaknesses in Semantic, Syntactic and Oral Language Expression Contribute to Reading Difficulties in Chinese Dyslexic Children

“…In general, dyslexic children in this study performed significantly poorer than their CA controls but similarly to their RL controls in most of the language measures except semantic skills and syntactic skills on multiple modifiers. Such findings have been reported repeatedly in prior studies (Chik et al , ; Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2002) and used as evidence for the developmental lag interpretation of reading disabilities (Backman, Mamen, & Ferguson, ; Goswami & Bryant, ; Stanovich, Nathan, & Vala‐Rossi, ). According to the interpretation, reading‐disabled children's failure in reading could be attributed to a lag in the development of reading‐related skills such as phonological processing skills, and thus, poor readers are expected to perform like their RL counterparts in reading and reading‐related tasks (Beech & Harding, ).…”

“…More importantly, in a study of modelling the relationship between cognitive–linguistic skills and reading in Chinese, Yeung et al () reported that syntactic word order skills accounted for unique variance in both sentence and passage reading comprehension controlling for the effects of word reading and other cognitive skills. Chik et al () reported that Chinese dyslexic children performed significantly less well in the tasks of oral vocabulary, word semantics, word order and discourse than their age‐matched typically developing counterparts and both oral vocabulary and word semantics made significant prediction to reading comprehension performance except for the word order task. It is noteworthy that in another study, Chik et al () did find significant predictive effect of word order to sentence comprehension among Chinese typically developing second graders.…”

“…Among these deficits, rapid naming and visual–orthographic processing are most dominant, whereas phonological deficit is not (Chan, Ho, Tsang, Lee, & Chung, ). In addition, morphological awareness, syntactic awareness and verbal memory were also found to be core deficits in Chinese dyslexic individuals (Chik et al , ; Chung, Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, ; Shu, McBride‐Chang, Wu, & Liu, ). In particular, Chinese dyslexic children were observed to share with SLI children a broad range of impairments in language and reading‐related cognitive skills including phonological retrieval, memory and awareness, and morphological awareness (Wong, Kidd, Ho, & Au, ).…”

Cross-modal integration in the brain is related to phonological awareness only in typical readers, not in those with reading difficulty

“…The greater ability to access and manipulate phonemic knowledge in higher-elision RD children did not translate to improved cross-modal mapping, consistent with the finding that orthographic information is less likely to intrude on phonological tasks for RD readers (Landerl et al, 1996). RD interventions often involve extensive phonological awareness training (Hulme et al, 2012; Youman and Mather, 2012), but the emphasis on phonological awareness may be at the expense of learning to map between modalities. If the critical deficit in dyslexia is in the mapping from orthography to phonology, orthographic knowledge will be less likely to facilitate the development of phonological awareness, and the two skills will be decoupled.…”

Probabilistic category learning in developmental dyslexia: Evidence from feedback and paired-associate weather prediction tasks.

“…For example, individuals with dyslexia are impaired in basic motor skills while performing an additional secondary task (Nicolson & Fawcett, 1990; Yap & van der Leij, 1994). Other studies reveal that individuals with dyslexia are impaired on motor adaptation (Brookes, Nicolson, & Fawcett, 2007) and implicit motor sequential learning tasks (Bennett, Romano, Howard, & Howard, 2008; Du & Kelly, 2012; Howard et al, 2006; Stoodley et al, 2006; Stoodley, Ray, Jack, & Stein, 2008; Vicari et al, 2005). Furthermore, procedural motor learning skills of individuals with dyslexia are less stable, more prone to interference (Gabay, Schiff, & Vakil, 2012b) and consolidate less effectively (Gabay, Schiff, & Vakil, 2012a).…”