Morphosyntactic skills of poor comprehenders

描述（由申请人提供）：有阅读障碍的儿童在学习困难和负面社会后果方面的风险增加。最近，研究人员开始研究即使有良好的单词阅读技能也会出现的阅读理解问题。符合这一特征的儿童通常被称为“理解能力差”，他们占学龄儿童的5-10%。对理解能力差的人的研究表明，他们表现出的口头语言缺陷在某些方面与患有特殊语言障碍（SLI）的儿童相似，但迄今为止，这两种人群一直被分开考虑。其中一个原因是，特殊语言障碍通常在4-5岁的孩子身上被发现，而理解能力差的孩子通常要到三年级或四年级才会被发现。大多数关于理解能力差的研究都集中在语义和文本级语言领域的缺陷上。虽然从标准化语言评估的粗粒度测试来看，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。提出的研究将通过检查语法的一个方面，特别是形态语法，在较差的理解解决这一差距的文献。形态句法缺陷是特殊语言障碍儿童的标志；因此，这项研究的结果对于比较理解能力差的儿童和特殊语言障碍儿童特别有用。此外，由于形态句法困难可以比阅读理解问题更早地被发现，因此这项研究有可能为早期识别计划提供信息。在本研究中，有或没有特殊语言障碍的四年级低年级理解者和与学校年级和单词阅读能力相匹配的典型发展对照将完成三个测试形态句法技能的任务。此外，他们还将完成一项综合语言测试，以及接受性词汇和语音加工测试，以评估他们在其他语言领域的技能，并将本研究与以往的研究相参考。具体问题是：(1)与与学校年级和单词阅读能力相匹配的典型读者相比，有和没有特殊语言障碍的理解能力差的读者在词形语法方面是否存在显著困难？(2)理解能力差的人是否表现出与特殊语言障碍相关的一般语言缺陷？(3)符合SLI标准的较差理解者与不符合SLI标准的较差理解者和符合单词阅读能力的典型读者在词形句法任务上的表现是否存在差异？这项研究将通过增加对阅读理解能力低下者的语言特征的描述，描述他们的缺陷领域，确定治疗目标，以及改善早期识别有阅读理解问题风险的儿童的努力，从而有利于公共卫生。

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.