Semantic Processing in Children with Reading Comprehension Deficits

Abstract

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.