Ioana Constantinescu & Roberto G. de Almeida
Concordia University
Most current research on reading deficits associated with learning disabilities (LD) has focused on text comprehension (Perfetti, 1997). It is not clear, however, the locus of such deficits --- whether they reflect readers' difficulty forming discourse-based representations such as inferential relations and long-distance dependencies or whether they reflect difficulties in computing local relations between elements within the sentences of a text. Among the local computations performed by the reader during sentence comprehension, it is from verb-specific information that the grammatical and semantic roles of the participants of the event described by the sentence have to be extracted. In the few studies that investigated syntactic variables in reading disabilities, the hypothesis that reading comprehension is impaired due to a syntactic deficit has not been confirmed (e.g., Glass & Perna, 1986).
We report an experiment that explores the role of verb-complement preferences in sentence reading by LD adolescents diagnosed as poor readers and college students with no reading disabilities. Following studies by Clifton and colleagues (Clifton, Frazier, & Connine, 1984; Schmauder, Kennison & Clifton, 1991; Schmauder, 1991) we investigated how transitivity preferences may affect verb-complement reading times. Participants were presented with preferred transitive (e.g., visit) or preferred intransitive (e.g., walk) verbs in both transitive (1a, 2a) and intransitive (1b, 2b) sentence contexts.
| (1) | a. | The child visited his dog. |
| b. | The child visited with his friends. | |
| (2) | a. | The child walked his dog. |
| b. | The child walked with his friends. |
Transitivity preferences followed Connine et al.'s (1984) norms. We employed a moving-window self-paced reading paradigm and measured primarily post-verbal region reading times. Results show that preferred frames are read significantly faster than non-preferred frames by both the LD and normal groups. However, the difference between preferred and non-preferred frames is significantly higher in the LD group than in the group of readers without reading disability. The results indicate that non-preferred structures impair on-line reading comprehension in LD more than in non LD readers.
We will report data from this study and discuss its implications for the investigation of parsing and reading deficits in LD. It is hypothesized that non-preferred verb-argument frames impair LD readers ability to form linguistic-specific representations at the sentence level which may affect global text reading comprehension.
References
Connine, C., Ferreira, F., Jones, C., Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1984). Verb frame preferences: descriptive norms. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 13, 307-319.
Clifton, C., Frazier, L., & Connine, C. (1984). Lexical expectations in sentence comprehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 23, 696-708.
Glass, A. L., & Perna, J. ( 1986). The role of syntax in reading disability. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 19, 354- 359.
Perfetti, C. A. (1997). Sentences, individual differences, and multiple texts: Three issues in text comprehension. Discourse Processes, 23, 337-335.
Schmauder, A. R. (1991). Argument structure frames. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17, 49-65.
Schmauder, A. R., Kennison, S. M., & Clifton, C. (1991). On the conditions necessary for obtaining argument structure complexity effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17, 1188- 1192.