The Effect of Syntactic Impairment on Errors in Reading Aloud: Text Reading and Comprehension of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

Abstract

Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children show difficulties in reading aloud and comprehension of texts. Here, we examined the hypothesis that these reading difficulties are tightly related to the syntactic deficit displayed by DHH children. We first assessed the syntactic abilities of 32 DHH children communicating in spoken language (Hebrew) aged 9;1–12;2. We classified them into two groups of DHH children—with and without a syntactic deficit according to their performance in six syntactic tests assessing their comprehension and production of sentences with syntactic movement. We also assessed their reading at the single word level using a reading aloud test of words, nonwords, and word pairs, designed to detect the various types of dyslexia, and established, for each participant, whether they had dyslexia and of what type. Following this procedure, 14 of the children were identified with a syntactic deficit, and 15 with typical syntax (3 marginally impaired); 22 of the children had typical reading at the word level, and 4 had dyslexia (3 demonstrated sublexical reading). The main experiment examined reading aloud and comprehension of 6 texts with syntactic movement (which contained, e.g., relative clauses and topicalized sentences), in comparison to 6 parallel texts without movement. The results indicated a close connection between syntactic difficulties and errors in reading aloud and in comprehension of texts. The DHH children with syntactic deficit made significantly more errors in reading aloud and more comprehension errors than the DHH children with intact syntax (and than the hearing controls), even though most of them did not have dyslexia at the word level. The DHH children with syntactic deficit made significantly more reading errors when they read texts with syntactic movement than on matched texts without movement. These results indicate that difficulties in text reading, manifesting both in errors in reading aloud and in impaired comprehension, may stem from a syntactic deficit and may occur even when reading at the word level is completely intact.

Stages rather than ages in the acquisition of movement structures: Data from sentence repetition and 27696 spontaneous clauses

“…In Hebrew, verb movement to the second position is typically triggered by some element (e.g., temporal adverbs, prepositional phrases, objects, wh-elements, Shlonsky & Doron 1992;Shlonsky 1997) in the first position of the sentence (Spec-CP), attracting the verb towards itself (like the word 'yesterday', attracting the verb 'ate' in the example above). In Hebrew, V-C is stylistic and appears mainly in literature (including children books and songs, as well as for adults) and in formal contexts, so such sentences are very frequent in children's books and songs (Zuckerman 2001, for example, reported that 75% of the sentences in children's books included V-C; Friedmann & Novogrodsky 2004, counted 6074 sentences in children's books and second grade textbooks, and found that 19.4% of the sentences included verb movement to second position, see also Szterman & Friedmann 2020). In literary narratives, V-C may occur with no trigger, and then the verb may appear first in the sentence.…”