Syntactic Comprehension Research Articles

A study of the relationship between syntactic development and concrete operations in deaf children.

The linguistic and cognitive skills of 59 severe-to-profound and profoundly deaf children between the ages of 7 and 15 were examined. Students were administered a test of syntactic comprehension and four Piagetian operational tasks in the areas of conservation, classification, seriation, and numeration. Operational deaf children performed better than non-operational deaf children on the test of syntactic comprehension. Students whose parents consistently signed to them showed greater syntactic comprehension than did students whose parents signed less consistently. Children with more consistent sign language exposure at home also tended to have more advanced operational skills, though not to a statistically significant degree.

Auditory Language Comprehension in Aphasia: A Factor-Analytic Study

A battery of nine auditory comprehension test. taken by seventy aphasics, was subjected to a factor analysis. Two factors, interpretable respectively as a lexical semantic and a syntactic comprehension factor, were obtained. Comprehension described in terms of these factors was found to be related to criterion variables of importance, namely the Token Test and a rating of comprehension in daily life. Broca's aphasics were found to be more impaired in syntactic than in lexical semantic comprehension; Wernicke patients tended to have low scores on both factors. The results of this study support the view of independent lexically based and syntactic processing in auditory comprehension which can be differentially disrupted by brain damage.

The Comprehension of Double-Object Constructions in Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics

A series of studies utilizing the Double Object Comprehension Test is reviewed. This test, designed to distinguish between classes of lexical and syntactic comprehension errors, was administered to normal children, good and poor readers, hearing-impaired populations, mentally retarded populations, aphasics and non-native speakers of English. The results strongly indicated that linguistically "immature" individuals often can correctly comprehend only "base" double-object constructions, while linguistically "mature" individuals can readily comprehend both the "base" and the "derived" double-object forms. These trends are shown to be much like comprehension differences displayed between active and passive sentence constructions. Furthermore, it is argued that such "base" forms serve as comprehensional prerequisites for the more linguistically complex "derived" forms. Implications are discussed in terms of a psycho- and neuro-linguistic framework.

Language ability in right and left hemiplegic children

The language abilities of three right and three left hemiplegic children between 6 and 8 years of age were compared. All children presented pre- or perinatally acquired unilateral lesions confirmed by CT scan, normal hearing, comparable performance I.Q.'s, and were being educated in regular classrooms. Right hemiplegic children were found to be inferior to the left hemiplegics on tasks of speech production, vocabulary comprehension, and syntactic comprehension and formulation. Right hemiplegics also acquired single words and two-word combinations later than did left hemiplegics.

Capacity and strategy for syntactic comprehension after left or right hemidecortication

The left and right hemispheres perform different encoding and decoding operations on a syntactically complex sentence in order to identify its meaning. Hemispheric asymmetry for syntax involves not only variations in capacity, but also differences in the strategy used to effect similar language performance.

Symptoms without signs in outpatients attending ophthalmology clinics.

Ophthalmic outpatients without physical signs have been shown, as a group, to be significantly more anxious and depressed than a control group. They also have a higher incidence of somatic complaints of a kind commonly made by patients with psychiatric 'disorder'. There was a higher incidence of past psychiatric history in the proband group, and they also gave a greater subjective assessment of recent conscious life stress.

Syntactic Recognition in Aphasics

The present study was designed to investigate the process of syntactic recognition of heard sentences in aphasics, especially the effect of changes in word order on syntactic recognition.Comprehension performance of 27 aphasics was studied by using two types cf active and passive test senteces; sentences having basic word order and sentences having converse word order.The results comfirmed earlier observations reporting that comprehension of sentences having converse word order was significantly poorer than comprehension of sentences having basic word order. It was suggested that there were two strategies employed by aphasics; the word order strategy and the particle strategy. Subjects were classified into four groups according to ability to use the strategies.The correlation between the syntactic comprehension and the other variables was discussed.

Role of referent concreteness in the acquisition of passive sentence comprehension through abstract modeling

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that development of syntactic comprehension through verbal modeling is enhanced by referent concreteness as a contextual influence. Young children heard a model narrate a series of events in passive form while the model either performed the corresponding activities, showed pictures portraying the same activities, or displayed no referential aids. In accord with prediction, verbal modeling with enactive referents produced higher levels of comprehension of passives than modeling with pictorial referents or modeling without referential aids. Modeling with pictorial referents and modeling without referents did not differ in overall efficacy. However, modeling alone produced results that were less consistent across different measures of comprehension. Children who lacked understanding of passives were more dependent on concrete referents than those who had some initial comprehension of the linguistic form. The results suggest that verbal modeling with pictorial referents and verbal modeling alone facilitate comprehension of passives, whereas verbal modeling with enactive referents promotes learning. Findings of a supplemental experiment reveal that the effects of verbal modeling on comprehension are enhanced when syntactic forms occur in a meaningful verbal context.

Speech-reading skills of deaf children

An experimental test of speech-reading was designed to assess the relationship between speech-reading skills and language comprehension in a group of 13-year-old deaf children. The test was constructed to satisfy the criteria of simple active-declarative sentences in which the subject, object, and action could be systematically varied. Four different sentence types were generated that varied in range of difficulty. The experimental speech-reading test was administered as part of a comprehensive battery of language, speech reception and speech production tests. Results suggest that speech-reading skills are more closely correlated with language tests such as the tests of syntactic comprehension. Speech-reading was less closely correlated with speech reception and speech production measurements in this population. [Research supported by New York State Education Department, GREED Project ED 73-001 DC.]

Reversing Irreversible Sentences: Semantic and Syntactic Factors

Active and passive sentences were presented with probable and improbable semantic content to 100 first graders and 100 kindergarteners. An “irreversible” sentence was considered probable and its reverse was considered improbable. In a design employing syntax, probability, grade, and sex as factors, probability and syntax were found significant both as main effects and in their interaction. Probability had little effect on the comprehension of active sentences, but strongly affected comprehension of passive sentences. First graders responded correctly more often than kindergarteners; the difference was greatest on improbable sentences, with improbable passive sentences the most difficult. Sex differences were not found. The greater difficulty in comprehending less familiar sentences when syntactic form is not supported by semantic content suggests that the semantic component of grammar may play an important role in the child's acquisition of syntactic comprehension.

Development of Syntactic Comprehension in Preschool Children as a Function of Socioeconomic Level: Erratum.

Development of Syntactic Comprehension in Preschool Children as a Function of Socioeconomic Level: Erratum.

Semantic comprehension in Aphasia

The AA constructed a multiple choice test to evaluate the ability of the aphasic patients to understand the meaning of words in clusters of semantically similar alternatives. The clinical usefulness and the psychometric characteristics of the test are discussed. The results of the patients in this test were compared with other tests for phonetic and syntactic comprehension; an attempt was made to specify the psycholinguistic characteristics of the receptive disorders in different aphasic syndromes.

Development of syntactic comprehension in preschool children as a function of socioeconomic level.

Development of syntactic comprehension in preschool children as a function of socioeconomic level.

Syntactic Comprehension in Aphasia

The present paper is a presentation of a test for measuring the syntactic comprehension in aphasic patients: some of its psychometric characteristics and its clinical usefulness are discussed. By using this test the performances in verbal comprehension of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics are compared: although the two groups give different quantitative results, almost no qualitative differences are found between them. The data obtained by the aphasics are also compared with the results of groups of children 3 to 6 years of age: the dissolution of syntactic comprehension in aphasics is highly correlated with the order of acquisition of the same rules in children.