Syntaksforståelsens betydning for læseforståelse

Hélène Deacon and Katie Hoferek, Dalhousie University

To be able to understand texts as a whole, children need to be able to make sense of the sentences that make them up. Here I report on recent studies from my lab showing the power of children’s skill with sentences—assessed in an oral context—on their reading comprehension. I also consider how we might specify the role of syntax in models of reading comprehension.

Kate Nation, University of Oxford

To comprehend text, children need to understand sentences. In this talk, I focus on sentences that contain a temporary syntactic ambiguity (e.g., in the sentence While Anna was dressing the baby played in its crib, after reading dressing, it is not clear whether Anna is dressing the baby or dressing herself). How and when do children resolve the ambiguity to bring about comprehension? We will consider what it means to understand a sentence by contrasting children’s online processing as they read with their offline comprehension, as tapped by answers to explicit comprehension questions. The talk will provide opportunity to consider the multifaceted nature of reading comprehension, and we will also reflect on the challenge of trying to assess children’s comprehension ability.

Maryellen MacDonald, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Many educators have heard of book language, the language patterns that are characteristic of books and other texts, but they haven’t necessarily heard why they should care about book language. This talk will explain why the language of books is different than speech to children and why that difference matters to children’s reading comprehension. I’ll focus on sentence comprehension, the ability to convert the words and syntax of a sentence into an understanding of what the sentence means. While sentence comprehension typically seems effortless for fluent readers, research shows that both words and syntax are frequently ambiguous, requiring mental effort to settle on the most likely interpretation of a sentence. Knowledge of book language is critical to these mental processes of sentence comprehension. I’ll discuss how young readers acquire knowledge of book language and sentence comprehension skills and how to help children along this path.

Susan Ebbels, Moor House Research and Training Institute

Difficulties with production and comprehension of sentences are very common among children with Developmental Language Disorder and indeed among children with broader language disorders associated with conditions such as deafness, Down syndrome and autism. Effective and efficient intervention first requires identification of the specific grammatical structures and features which cause particular challenges.

Intervention can then be specifically targeted at those structures which are likely to have the greatest impact on the developing language system, functional communication and/or access to the educational curriculum.

Intervention may focus on the child, aiming to increase the range of structures they can accurately use and understand such that they can communicate and access the curriculum more effectively. Intervention may also focus on the child’s environment, working with parents, teachers and those involved in designing and writing curriculum and exam materials to help them to avoid using structures that are likely to cause challenges for children with language disorders and where these cannot be avoided, to provide specific support.

In this talk I will talk first about individualised intervention focused on improving the range of sentence structures that children with DLD can use. Then I will talk about a project investigating their understanding of Maths word problems, particularly looking at how the structure and language of the word problem affects performance.

Mads Poulsen & Rikke Vang Christensen, University of Copenhagen

We present an overview of a series of studies to what extent school-aged children differ in how well they extract information from word-order in sentences, to what extent this is related to their text comprehension, whether this depends on home language status, and whether we were able to improve grade 5 children’s syntactic proficiency through instruction.