Difficulties in Comprehending Affirmative and Negative Sentences: Evidence From Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

Abstract

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.

Scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties

“…The reading skills of children in the poor reader and typical reader groups were assessed using a literacy test which has been used in prior research (Hu et al, 2018). Children were placed in the poor reader group if their scores on the literacy test were at least 1.5 SD below the average mean for their grade, and if they had difficulties in reading and writing Chinese according to daily observations in their teachers’ reports.…”

“…Moreover, they were tested for phonological awareness and morphological awareness, which have been claimed to be essential for learning Chinese (McBride & Wang, 2015). Phonological awareness was assessed with onset detection, rhyme detection and tone detection tests, and morphological awareness was assessed with homophone awareness and homograph awareness tests (Hu et al, 2018). A summary of the children’s descriptive characteristics is presented in Table 1.…”

“…Growing evidence has shown that children with reading difficulties (RD) have significant impairments in oral language (Byrne, 1981; Cantiani, Lorusso, Perego, Molteni, & Guasti, 2015; Fiorin, 2010; Joanisse, Manis, Keating, & Seidenberg, 2000; Nation & Snowling, 2000; Scarborough, 1991; Waltzman & Cairns, 2000; Wilsenach, 2006; Wise, Sevcik, Morris, Lovett, & Wolf, 2007; among many others). In language comprehension, children with RD make more errors or take longer than age-matched typical readers in interpreting affirmative and negative sentences (Hu, Vender, Fiorin, & Delfitto, 2018; Vender & Delfitto, 2010), passive sentences (Leikin & Assayag-Bouskila, 2004; Reggiani, 2010) and relative clauses (Arosio, Panzeri, Molteni, Magazù, & Guasti, 2017; Bar-Shalom, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1993; Byrne, 1981; Casalis, Leuwers, & Hilton, 2012; Mann, Shankweiler, & Smith, 1984; Smith, Macaruso, Shankweiler, & Crain, 1989; Stein, Cairns, & Zurif, 1984).…”

Remote Dyslexia Screening for Bilingual Children

“…The Mandarin screening tasks consist of a Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) test, two tasks on judgement of correctness of Chinese characters (Hu, unpublished) and three subtests investigating metaphonological skills [48].…”

Dyslexia and Pragmatic Skills

“…For this reason, much effort has been put into studying the abilities of people with dyslexia at various levels of the linguistic system, usually in association with other cognitive aspects. Evidence suggests that this specific learning disorder is associated with difficulties in non-word repetition and rapid naming (Melby-Lervåg et al, 2012;Ramus et al, 2013;Snowling, 2000) and impacts structural language skills at large (Arosio et al, 2017;Bishop & McDonald, 2009;Bishop & Snowling 2004;Cantiani et al, 2013;Cardinaletti & Volpato, 2015;Hu et al, 2018;Joanisse et al, 2000). Over the past two decades, other problems have been observed in children and adults with reading disorders, including poor executive functioning (Alteimeier et al, 2008;Baker & Ireland, 2007;Cardillo et al, 2018;Cutting et al, 2009;Ferrara et al, 2020;Horowitz-Kraus, 2014;Kasirer & Mashal, 2017;Locascio et al, 2010;Mashal & Kasirer, 2011;Sesma et al, 2009;Smith-Spark et al, 2016;Whitney et al, 2009), issues in working memory capacity (Baddeley, 1998;Gathercole et al, 1992), processing speed and skill automatization (Nicolson & Fawcett, 2008), vocabulary storage and retrieval (Cappelli, this volume;Cappelli & Noccetti, 2016;Kormos & Smith, 2012;Noccetti, this volume), text comprehension (Bishop, 1997;Ransby & Swanson, 2003;Simmons & Singleton, 2000;Xiao & Ho, 2014), and in the control of attentive resources (Lallier et al, 2009), including orienting ...…”