Semantic Processing in Children with Reading Comprehension Deficits
Issue Date
2008-01-01Author
Gillispie, William Matthew
Publisher
University of Kansas
Format
86 pages
Type
Dissertation
Degree Level
Ph.D.
Discipline
Speech-Language-Hearing: Science Disorders
Rights
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This investigation compared the semantic processing abilities of fourth-grade children with specific reading comprehension deficit (SRCD) to a chronological-age matched control group (4NR) and a younger, reading comprehension matched control group (2NR) on a single word shadowing task. During this experimental task, the children were expected to listen to a sentence and repeat the final word (cued by a change in speaker voice) of the sentence as fast and as accurately as possible. There were two experimental conditions: 1) a high cloze probability sentence condition in which the final word of the sentence or target word was semantically related to the sentence prime and 2) a low cloze probability sentence condition in which the target word was semantically anomalous to the sentence prime. All three groups of children displayed higher contextual effects in the high cloze probability condition compared to the low cloze probability condition. However, children with SRCD did not perform significantly different than controls in either experimental condition. These findings provide evidence of contextual enhancement within the single-word shadowing task, even for children with SRCD, and are discussed within the context of a semantic processing deficit theory in children with SRCD.
Collections
Items in KU ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
We want to hear from you! Please share your stories about how Open Access to this item benefits YOU.