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Syntactic awareness and reading ability: Is there any evidence for a special relationship?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2007

KATE CAIN
KATE CAIN
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
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Abstract

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed. After vocabulary, memory explained variance on the word-order correction task; in contrast, grammatical knowledge explained performance on the grammatical correction task. The relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension was mediated by vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory; in contrast, word reading and syntactic awareness shared unique variance not explained by these controls. The implications for how we measure syntactic awareness and its relation with reading ability are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 679 - 694
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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