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Poor readers are not easy to fool: Comprehension of adjectives with exceptional control properties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Paul Macaruso ,
Donald Shankweiler ,
Brian Byrne  and
Stephen Crain
Paul Macaruso*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts General Hospital
Donald Shankweiler
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories
Brian Byrne
Affiliation:
University of New England, New South Wales, Australia
Stephen Crain
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories
*
Paul Macaruso, MGH Neurolinguistics Laboratory, 101 Merrimac Street, Boston, MA 02114
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Abstract

An earlier experiment by Byrne (1981) found that young, poor readers tend to act out sentences containing adjectives with object control, like easy, as though they were adjectives with subject control, like eager. Byrne interpreted this result as evidence that poor readers lag in the acquisition of syntactic knowledge underlying this distinction. However, the possibility that a processing limitation could have contributed to the poor readers' difficulties with objectcontrol adjectives had not been fully explored. In an effort to tease apart these alternatives, we tested comprehension of object-control adjectives in second grade good and poor readers, using both an act-out task and a sentence-picture matching task. Contrary to Byrne's (1981) results, we did not find significant group differences in interpreting object-control adjectives with either task. Reasons for the discrepancy are suggested, and remedies for the pitfalls in designing experiments to assess syntactic knowledge in young children are proposed.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 285 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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