Morphosyntactic skills of poor comprehenders

描述（由申请人提供）：有阅读障碍的儿童有学习困难和负面社会后果的风险增加。近年来，研究者开始调查尽管具有良好的文字阅读技能，但仍会出现阅读理解问题。符合这一特征的儿童通常被称为“贫困辍学儿童”，他们占学龄儿童的5-10%。对贫穷的语言障碍儿童的研究表明，他们在口头语言方面表现出缺陷，在某些方面与特殊语言障碍儿童（SLI）相似，但这两个人群迄今为止一直被分开考虑。其中一个原因是，SLI通常在4-5岁的儿童中被发现，而不良的语言障碍者通常直到三年级或四年级才被发现。大多数关于贫穷的母语者的研究都集中在语义和文本语言领域的缺陷上。虽然贫穷的母语者也表现出句法缺陷，从标准化语言评估的粗粒度测试，很少有研究仔细检查特定的句法结构的知识。拟议中的研究将解决这一差距，在文献中，通过检查语法的一个方面，特别是形态句法，在穷人的发音。形态句法缺陷是SLI儿童的一个标志，因此，本研究的结果将特别有助于比较贫穷的青少年与SLI儿童。此外，由于形态句法困难可以识别比阅读理解问题早得多，这项研究有可能通知早期识别程序。在这项研究中，四年级的穷人，有和没有SLI和典型的发展控制匹配的学校年级和单词阅读能力将完成三项任务检查形态句法技能。此外，他们将完成一个全面的语言测试，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，并将这项研究与以前的研究相结合。具体的问题是（1）与学校成绩和单词阅读能力相匹配的典型读者相比，有和没有SLI的不良阅读者在形态句法方面是否表现出显著的困难？(2)贫穷的母语使用者是否表现出与SLI相关的一般语言缺陷？(3)符合SLI标准的低水平词汇书写者与不符合SLI标准的低水平词汇书写者以及与单词阅读能力匹配的典型阅读者在形态句法任务上的表现是否不同？这项研究将有利于公共卫生，通过增加穷人的语言概况的规格，描述他们的赤字领域，确定治疗目标，并改善努力，以早期识别儿童的风险，为以后的阅读理解问题。

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.