Syntactic awareness in relation to reading skill and ongoing reading comprehension monitoring

Abstract

This research was designed to test the hypotheses that less skilled readers are delayed relative to skilled readers in their awareness of grammatical well formedness and that this delay is associated with relative failure to monitor ongoing reading comprehension. Fourth- and fifth-grade children varying in decoding ability were observed to differ in syntactic awareness, as reflected in their ability to correct grammatically deviant sentences within an oral language task, even with general verbal ability effects covaried. Performance on the syntactic awareness task (“syntactic control”) was correlated with measures of ongoing reading comprehension and comprehension monitoring and with performance on standardized tests of reading comprehension. These correlations remained significant when Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test verbal ability and, where appropriate, subjective text decoding effects were statistically controlled.