Deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures

ABSTRACTIt is commonly found that most deaf readers display an overall depressed level of reading performance in conjunction with specific difficulties in complex syntax. In this study, deaf good and poor readers' comprehension of relative clause structures was tested in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language. It was found that the behavior of deaf good and poor readers was parallel across relative clause sentence types, and that the deaf readers generally performed similarly to hearing readers tested in a different study. These results support the hypothesis that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate deaf good and poor readers. Instead, it is suggested that a processing deficit may underlie the poor readers' comprehension difficulties.

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Deficient syntactic control in poor readers: Is a weak phonetic memory code responsible?

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716400006512 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 2 (3) ◽

pp. 201-212 ◽

Cited By ~ 76

Author(s):

Brian Byrne

Keyword(s):

Relative Clause ◽

Grade Level ◽

Poor Readers ◽

Second Grade ◽

Good Readers ◽

The Poor ◽

Memory Code ◽

Normal Subject ◽

Good And Poor Readers

ABSTRACTGroups of good and poor readers at second-grade level were tested for comprehension of adjectival constructions of the John is eager/easy to please types and of center-embedded relative clause constructions. The poor readers were inferior to good readers in understanding O-type adjectives (easy) but not S-type (eager). As well, they were poorer at comprehending embedded sentences, but only when the sentences described improbable events, ones which reversed the normal subject/object roles. When either noun could, on pragmatic grounds, assume either role, both groups fared equally well. The results are interpreted as casting doubt on recent assertions that deficient use of a phonetic memory code underlies the syntactic inferiority often seen in poor readers. A more pervasive linguistic immaturity is suggested as being involved.

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Gettin’ together a posse

Sign Language & Linguistics ◽

10.1075/sll.16.2.02abn ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 125-156 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Natasha Abner

Keyword(s):

American Sign Language ◽

Sign Language ◽

Relative Clause ◽

American Sign ◽

Possessive Pronoun ◽

Verbal Predicate ◽

Possessive Constructions

This article addresses the derivational relationship between attributive (nominal) and predicative (verbal) possessives marked by the poss sign in American Sign Language. Though traditionally classified as a possessive pronoun, a collection of morphological, syntactic, and semantic patterns is presented here as evidence that poss instead displays the distributional characteristics of a verbal predicate in the language. Classifying poss as a verbal predicate of possession explains its presence in predicative possessives and allows its attributive use to be derived from this underlying verbal structure as an instance of a prenominal reduced relative clause modifier. These base structures and their interaction with other components of the predicative and attributive domains explain the documented properties of attributive and predicative poss possessives, including, crucially, the sometimes divergent behaviors of these two possessive constructions.

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A comparison of comprehension and production abilities of good and poor readers

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716400009553 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 197-227 ◽

Cited By ~ 40

Author(s):

Eva G. Bar-Shalom ◽

Stephen Crain ◽

Donald Shankweiler

Keyword(s):

Reading Disability ◽

Error Rate ◽

Relative Clause ◽

Reading Ability ◽

Poor Readers ◽

Production Task ◽

High Error Rate ◽

Good Readers ◽

The Poor ◽

Good And Poor Readers

ABSTRACTResearch from several sources indicates that reading disability is often associated with difficulty in comprehending some complex spoken sentences, including those with relative clauses. The present study exploits a new methodology, elicited production, to identify the source of comprehension difficulties of poor readers. Both the elicited production task and a conventional act-out task were employed in a study of 30 children (aged 7-8), who were selected for reading ability. On the act-out task, the poor readers displayed a high error rate on two relative clause structures (SO and OO relatives), as had been found by Mann, Shankweiler, and Smith (1984), but these structures were elicited from the poor readers as successfully as from the good readers (on more than 80% of trials).

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