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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.

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

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