Morphosyntactic skills of poor comprehenders

描述(申请人提供)：阅读障碍儿童学习困难和负面社会后果的风险增加。最近，研究人员开始研究阅读理解问题，尽管他们掌握了很好的单词阅读技能。符合这一特征的儿童通常被称为“理解能力差的人”，他们占学龄儿童的5%-10%。对理解力差的儿童的研究表明，他们在口语方面表现出缺陷，在某些方面类似于患有特殊语言障碍(SLI)的儿童，但到目前为止，这两个群体被分开考虑。其中一个原因是，SLI通常在4-5岁的儿童中发现，而理解力差的儿童通常要到三、四年级才能发现。大多数关于低理解者的研究都集中在语义和语篇层面的语言缺陷上。虽然根据标准化语言评估的粗粒度测试来衡量，理解能力差的人也表现出句法缺陷，但很少有研究仔细检查特定句法结构的知识。这项拟议的研究将通过检查理解能力差的人的句法的一个方面，特别是形态句法，来解决文献中的这一差距。形态合成缺陷是SLI儿童的一个标志；因此，这项研究的结果将特别有助于比较理解能力差的SLI儿童。此外，由于形态句法困难可以比阅读理解问题更早地被识别出来，这项研究有可能为早期识别程序提供参考。在这项研究中，四年级理解能力差的学生，无论有无SLI，并典型地发展与学校年级和单词阅读能力相匹配的对照，将完成三项检查形态句法技能的任务。此外，他们还将完成一项全面的语言测试，以及接受性词汇和语音处理测试，以评估他们在其他语言领域的技能，并参考以前的研究。具体的问题是：(1)与学校年级和单词阅读能力匹配的典型读者相比，有或没有SLI的低理解者在形态句法方面是否表现出显著的困难？(2)低理解者是否表现出与SLI相关的一般语言缺陷？(3)符合SLI标准的低理解者在形态句法任务上的表现与不符合SLI标准的低理解者和在单词阅读能力匹配的典型读者之间是否存在差异？这项研究将通过增加对理解不良儿童的语言特征的详细描述，描述他们的缺陷领域，确定治疗目标，并改进对未来阅读理解问题的风险儿童的早期识别，从而有益于公共健康。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children with reading disabilities have an increased risk for academic difficulties and negative social consequences. Recently, researchers have begun to investigate reading comprehension problems that occur in spite of good word reading skills. Children who fit this profile are often referred to as "poor comprehenders," and they comprise 5-10% of school-aged children. Studies of poor comprehenders show that they exhibit deficits in oral language that are in some ways similar to children with specific language impairment (SLI), but the two populations have thus far been considered separately. One reason for this is that SLI is typically identified in 4-5 year old children, whereas poor comprehenders are not usually identified until third or fourth grade. Most studies of poor comprehenders have focused on deficits in the domains of semantics and text-level language. Although poor comprehenders also show syntactic deficits, as measured by coarse-grained tests from standardized language assessments, few studies have closely examined knowledge of specific syntactic structures. The proposed study will address this gap in the literature by examining one aspect of syntax, specifically morpho-syntax, in poor comprehenders. Morphosyntactic deficits are a hallmark of children with SLI; thus, the results of this study will be particularly useful for comparing poor comprehenders to children with SLI. Also, because morpho-syntactic difficulties can be identified much earlier than reading comprehension problems, this study has the potential to inform early identification programs. In this study, fourth grade poor comprehenders with and without SLI and typically developing controls matched for school grade and word reading ability will complete three tasks examining morpho-syntactic skills. In addition, they will complete a comprehensive language test, and receptive vocabulary and phonological processing tests to assess their skills in other language domains and reference this study to previous studies. Specific questions are (1) Do poor comprehenders with and without SLI show significant difficulties with morpho-syntax compared to typical readers matched for school grade and word reading ability? (2) Do poor comprehenders display the general language deficits associated with SLI? (3) Do poor comprehenders meeting the criteria for SLI differ in their performance on morpho-syntactic tasks from poor comprehenders who do not meet SLI criteria and from typical readers matched for word reading ability? This research will benefit public health by increasing the specification of the linguistic profile of poor comprehenders, describing their areas of deficit, identifying treatment targets, and improving efforts toward the early identification of children at risk for later reading comprehension problems.