Learning disabled children's comprehension and production of syntactic devices for marking given versus new information

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study examined learning disabled children's ability to understand and use syntactic devices for marking given versus new information in discourse, a skill where syntactic and pragmatic knowledge intersect. Using a modification of Hornby's (1971) paradigm, learning disabled and nondisabled children in grades 1 through 6 selected pictures on the basis of varying sentence types, such that their choices revealed their identification of the given information in each sentence. The production of syntactic structures for marking new elements in sentences was also assessed. Multivariate analyses revealed grade and sex effects on the comprehension task, but the only effect involving group status indicated that learning disabled girls were less able to comprehend cleft sentences than the other children. On the production task, learning disabled children relied on less complex sentence types; however, their strategies for marking given versus new information were as effective as those of nondisabled children. Implications of these findings for the relations between syntactic repertoire and the ability to integrate given and new information in oral and written discourse are discussed.