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The association between comprehension of spoken sentences and early reading ability: the role of phonetic representation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Virginia A. Mann ,
Donald Shankweiler  and
Suzanne T. Smith
Virginia A. Mann
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and Bryn Mawr College
Donald Shankweiler
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and University of Connecticut
Suzanne T. Smith
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and University of Connecticut
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Abstract

When repeating spoken sentences, children who are good readers tend to be more accurate than poor readers because they are able to make more effective use of phonetic representation in the service of working memory (Mann, Liberman & Shankweiler 1980). This study of good and poor readers in the third grade has assessed both the repetition and comprehension of relative-clause sentences to explore more fully the association between early reading ability, spoken sentence processing and use of phonetic representation. It was found that the poor readers did less well than the good readers on sentence comprehension as well as on sentence repetition, and that their comprehension errors reflected a greater reliance on two sentence-processing strategies favoured by young children: the minimum-distance principle and conjoined-clause analysis. In general, the pattern of results is consonant with a view that difficulties with phonetic representation could underlie the inferior sentence comprehension of poor beginning readers. The finding that these children place greater reliance on immature processing strategies raises the further possibility that the tempo of their syntactic development may be slower than that of good readers.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , October 1984 , pp. 627 - 643
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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