Morphosyntactic Skills of Poor Comprehenders

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated the morpho-syntactic abilities of children who show deficits in reading comprehension in spite of adequate word reading abilities. These children are often referred to in the literature as "poor comprehenders" (PCs), and their reading comprehension problems are believed to stem from oral language deficits. In fact, many studies have documented PCs' deficits in semantics, syntax, and higher level language skills. Because most PCs also display normal nonverbal cognitive skills, they share much in common with children with specific language impairment (SLI), and studies have documented substantial overlap between the two classifications. This study sought to determine whether PCs display the same morpho-syntactic deficits that are characteristic of children with SLI. Method: Sixteen PCs and 24 controls participated in this study. All participants were in fourth grade and demonstrated good word reading and nonverbal cognitive abilities. They completed a battery of standardized language assessments and three experimental morpho-syntax tasks that examined knowledge of finiteness marking rules. The first two sets of analyses were conducted to determine if PCs showed morpho-syntactic weakness relative to controls and if their pattern of performance was characteristic of expectations for children with SLI. Then the PC group was subdivided into those who met criteria for SLI (PC-SLI) and those who did not (PC-Only). The third set of analyses looked for differences in morpho-syntactic performance between PCs with SLI and poor comprehenders without SLI. Results: The PC group achieved significantly lower scores than the control group on all non-phonological standardized language assessments, but the two groups performed equivalently on the phonological processing measure. The PC group also showed significantly weaker performance than controls across the three morpho-syntax tasks, and their pattern of performance indicated weakness with obligatory finiteness marking, regularization of irregular past tense, and subject-verb agreement. The first two weaknesses are characteristic of children with SLI. Although subject-verb agreement is not believed to be an issue for children with SLI, a small number of studies of older children with SLI have reported difficulty with this area. There was no distinguishable pattern of differences in morpho-syntactic performance between the PC-SLI and PC-Only groups. These results have implications for the early identification of later reading comprehension difficulties in children with good phonological skills.