Syntactic awareness in relation to reading skill and ongoing reading comprehension monitoring

JOURNAL

OF EXPERIMENTAL

CHILD

PSYCHOLOGY

41, 282-299

( 1986)

Syntactic Awareness in Relation to Reading Skill and Ongoing Reading Comprehension Monitoring JUDITH A. BOWEY University of Queensland This research was designed to test the hypotheses that less skilled readers are delayed relative to skilled readers in their awareness of grammatical well formedness and that this delay is associated with relative failure to monitor ongoing reading comprehension. Fourth- and fifth-grade children varying in decoding ability were observed to differ in syntactic awareness, as reflected in their ability to correct grammatically deviant sentences within an oral language task, even with general verbal ability effects covaried. Performance on the syntactic awareness task (“syntactic control”) was correlated with measures of ongoing reading comprehension and comprehension monitoring and with performance on standardized tests of reading comprehension. These correlations remained significant when Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test verbal ability and, where appropriate, subjective text decoding effects were statistically controlled. c! 1986 Academic Prers. Inc.

Despite the considerable attention focused on the role of metalinguistic skill in the acquisition of reading proficiency, research to date has dealt almost exclusively with the contributions of phonemic and word awareness (see Tunmer & Bowey, 1984). Only two studies have investigated the relationship between syntactic awareness and reading skill, and these have produced conflicting results. In her classic study of syntactic abilities in groups of gyear-old normal and dyslexic boys equated for Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) performance and age, Vogel (1975) assessed children’s awareness of grammaticality by requiring them to judge the syntactic acceptability of well-formed and morphologically deviant sentences, presented aurally. On this task, the dyslexic group performed at the same (chance) level as the normal group. It is important to note that mean group performance was not significantly above chance, as determined by the binomial test, This research was carried out at the University of Melbourne and was supported by a University of Melbourne Research Development Grant. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Australian Psychological Society, held in Sydney, September 1983. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Judith A. Bowey, Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia 4067. Australia. 282 0022-0965186 Copyright All rights

$3.00

0 1986 by Academic Press, Inc. of reproduction in any form reserved.

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for either group. This suggests either that the task instructions were not understood, or that neither group was capable of making grammaticality judgments. Using a different task, in which children were told that all sentences were wrong and asked to correct them, Pratt, Tunmer, and Bowey (1984) observed ceiling performance with items involving morphological deviance in much younger, 5- and 6-year-old, children. The Pratt et al. finding suggests that the error correction task may be more readily understood than the grammaticality judgment task. It would thus provide a more sensitive measure of syntactic awareness. Using a grammatical error correction task, Bowey (1986) observed a significant correlation between syntactic awareness and decoding skill in a sample of first- to fifth-grade children, with grade and PPVT-R vocabulary age effects statistically controlled. The discrepancy between the outcomes of Vogel’s and Bowey’s studies is probably attributable to the differential sensitivity of the tasks as measures of syntactic awareness. Nevertheless, in view of theoretical speculation concerning the contribution of syntactic awareness to text integration processes in reading (Tunmer & Bowey, 1984), it is important that Bowey’s (1986) finding of an association between syntactic awareness and reading proficiency be replicated. It is not, however, sufficient to demonstrate simply that good readers have superior syntactic awareness relative to poor readers. Research is required to indicate how syntactic awareness contributes to the reading process. A useful first step would be to demonstrate an association between syntactic awareness and online measures of the reading process expected to be facilitated by syntactic awareness. The present study attempts this by exploring the relationship between syntactic awareness and ongoing reading comprehension monitoring. A relatively small but consistent body of research suggests that poor readers experience greater difficulty than good readers in monitoring text comprehension. For instance, Garner (1980) reported that poor comprehenders were less aware than good comprehenders of semantic inconsistencies experimentally introduced into written text. Insofar as comprehension difficulties may occur at a number of levels (e.g., word, sentence, intersentence integration), comprehension monitoring cannot be regarded as a unitary skill. Failure to detect intersentence inconsistencies is indicative of comprehension-monitoring failure, but does not necessarily reveal the level at which initial comprehension (and comprehensionmonitoring) difficulty occurred. It is even conceivable that earlier comprehension difficulties might be involved and monitored, but inadequately resolved such that some intersentence inconsistencies might not be detectable. An index of on-line reading comprehension monitoring is required. Although such a measure might not directly reveal the level at which

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comprehension-monitoring difficulties occur, it would reflect the efficiency with which ongoing comprehension problems are corrected, and it can be studied in the reading of naturally occurring texts. Previous studies have interpreted the rate of oral reading errors (including self-corrections) that are acceptable in terms of prior story and surrounding sentence context as a measure of ongoing reading comprehension (e.g., Bowey, 1982, 1984). It would follow from this view that the rate of detection and correction of contextually unacceptable oral reading errors provides a measure of ongoing comprehension monitoring (see Bowey, 1985). Available evidence suggests that poor readers not only make a higher proportion of errors that are inappropriate to the surrounding context relative to good readers (Au, 1977; Bowey, 1985; Cohen, 1975; Whaley & Kibby, 1981) but also are less likely to correct these errors (Bowey, 1985). Although word decoding problems undoubtedly contribute to reading comprehension-monitoring failures, these failures cannot be explained solely in terms of decoding problems. For instance, Bowey (1985) found that, with overall prose reading error rate effects statistically controlled, less skilled readers still made a higher proportion of contextually unacceptable reading errors and a lower rate of contextually obligatory selfcorrections relative to skilled readers. Furthermore, Kotsonis and Patterson (1980) reported that, in an aurally presented game-learning task, learningdisabled boys were deficient in comprehension-monitoring skills relative to younger normally achieving boys matched on Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test IQ. The learning-disabled boys asserted that they knew how to play a new game when they actually had insufficient knowledge to be able to play it properly. These studies show that poor readers experience comprehension-monitoring difficulties even when text decoding difficulties are either statistically controlled or not involved. It has been argued that reading comprehension-monitoring failures may reflect problems encountered at any level of text processing. They cannot be explained solely in terms of word decoding difficulties, nor do they necessarily reflect intersentence integration problems. Reading comprehension monitoring requires evaluation of both the syntactic and semantic cohesion of the perceived message. Before semantic consistency can be assessed, the message must be integrated syntactically. There is some evidence that poor readers are inferior to good readers in monitoring the grammatical well formedness of their rendition of the printed text. When oral reading errors are evaluated on purely syntactic grounds, poor readers produce higher rates of grammatically unacceptable errors (Clay, 1968) and make fewer grammatically based self-corrections (Weber, 1970). There is, as noted earlier, inconsistent evidence concerning the relationship between reading skill and syntactic awareness, as measured in oral language tasks (Bowey, 1986; Vogel, 1975). It is thus not known whether or not

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poor readers’ difficulties in monitoring the grammatical acceptability of their rendition of the text reflects a more general delay in the development of syntactic awareness, or whether such problems are limited to the reading task. A clear answer to this question would assist in the development of appropriate remediation procedures for ongoing comprehensionmonitoring difficulties. The present study was designed to clarify the relationship between syntactic awareness, evaluated in an oral task, and reading proficiency by investigating two related hypotheses (1) that less skilled readers are inferior relative to skilled readers in syntactic awareness and (2) that syntactic awareness is associated with both ongoing reading comprehension monitoring and ongoing and overall reading comprehension. Awareness of grammatical well formedness, or syntactic awareness, was assessed by examining children’s responses to grammatically deviant sentences in an error correction task. Children were required to listen to grammatically ill-formed sentences. Informed that all of the sentences they would hear contained a “mistake,” so that they sounded “wrong,” children were asked in the error correction task to “fix the sentence up.” Two steps were taken to ensure that children’s performance on the error correction task did not simply reflect general verbal proficiency. First, only sentence structures known to have been acquired by children of the age range studied were used. Second, the PPVT-R was administered to all children, so that general verbal ability could be statistically controlled, where appropriate. The sentence correction task has been used in previous studies showing that older children are better able to correct grammatically unacceptable sentences (Bowey, 1986; Menyuk, 1969; Pratt et al., 1984). However, it has also been reported that young children often correct these sentences, even when told that the sentences are wrong and instructed to imitate them. This tendency declines with age (Bowey, 1986; Menyuk, 1969). The ability to repeat verbatim a sentence that does not directly correspond with the speaker’s idiolect requires the speaker to attend to the explicit grammatical form of an utterance, rather than to its meaning (Labov, 1969). In an error imitation task, spontaneous corrections probably reflect a failure to detect grammatical errors, and may thus be considered an indirect measure of syntactic awareness (see also Menyuk, 1969). Children’s performance on an elicited error correction task may incorporate “spontaneous” as well as “intentional” corrections. Bowey (1986) thus proposed that a purer measure of syntactic awareness could be obtained by calculating the difference between the number of corrected sentences in an error correction task and an error imitation task. This measure of children’s awareness of grammatical well formedness was termed “syntactic control.” Bowey (1986) reported that performance on this measure increased dramatically from preschool to second grade, after which there was little further increase.

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A. BOWEY

Children’s ongoing reading comprehension and comprehensionmonitoring abilities were examined using qualitative measures of oral reading performance selected from data obtained in a concurrent experiment, reported and discussed in detail by Bowey (1985). These measures included the rate of contextually acceptable reading errors, the rate of errors which, as first uttered, violated prior story context, the rate of contextually obligatory self-corrections, and the rate of contextually optional self-corrections. In addition, the overall prose reading error rate was obtained as a measure of subjective text decoding difficulty. The rate of contextually acceptable reading errors is a hybrid measure, reflecting both the anticipatory use of context to constrain possible reading responses and the retrospective use of context to monitor comprehension (through the detection and correction of contextually deviant errors). The degree to which context is used to constrain the range of articulated reading responses is reflected (negatively) in the rate of reading errors which, as first articulated, violate prior story and sentence context. This measure may thus be viewed as the purest measure of ongoing reading comprehension, although it should be noted that this measure probably includes processes operating after lexical access, particularly in good readers (see Bowey, 1985). The retrospective use of context to monitor comprehension is reflected in the rate of contextually obligatory selfcorrections. On the other hand, since (by definition) they are already contextuaily constrained, the rate of contextually unnecessary or optionai self-corrections may be taken to reflect a visually based graphememonitoring self-correction strategy. The rate of these self-corrections was included as a check that the rate of contextually obligatory self-corrections primarily reflected comprehension monitoring, rather than grapheme monitoring. If these assumptions are correct, the two measures should yield different patterns of results (Bowey, 1985). In the experiment described, three standardized tests of reading proficiency, including two comprehension tests, were administered. Children were divided into two reading ability groups on the basis of performance on the third test, which measured decoding skill. The decision to base reading group assignment on decoding skill rather than comprehension skill rendered the present study directly comparable to the concurrent experiment described in Bowey (19851, from which the ongoing oral reading data of the present study were obtained. Bowey’s (1985) study tested Stanovich’s (1980) interactive-compensatory hypothesis concerning the differential relationships between decoding skill and the use of context to facilitate word recognition and comprehension-monitoring processes within an oral reading task. According to Stanovich, the automatic and more efficient word recognition of skilled decoders allows them to focus more attention (relative to less skilled decoders) on higher-level comprehension processes, including the use of context to monitor text comprehension. According to this view, poor reading comprehension-

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monitoring performance on the part of less skilled decoders (Bowey, 1985) is an indirect consequence of their inefficient decoding skills and does not necessarily involve more general comprehension-monitoring abilities. As the review above indicates, existing research provides no clear evidence concerning the question of whether or not difficulties experienced by less skilled decoders in monitoring the contextual acceptability of their rendition of the printed text are confined to reading tasks. By comparing the syntactic awareness of skilled and less skilled decoders, it was possible to address this issue, while ensuring comparability between this and Bowey’s (1985) research. Further correlational analyses provided information concerning the interrelationships existing among reading comprehension skill, syntactic awareness, and ongoing reading comprehension monitoring. Positive correlations were predicted between the experimental measures of syntactic awareness and rates of contextually acceptable errors (ongoing comprehension) and contextually obligatory self-corrections (ongoing comprehension monitoring). A negative correlation was predicted between syntactic awareness and the rate of errors violating prior story context (ongoing comprehension). No significant correlation was expected between syntactic awareness and the rate of contextually optional self-corrections. Positive correlations were also expected between syntactic awareness and performance on the standardized reading tests. METHOD Subjects The sample studied is the same as that described in Bowey (1985)48 fourth- and fifth-grade children attending a state primary school, located in an “average” socioeconomic status suburb of Melbourne. All were native monolingual speakers of English. There were approximately equal numbers of boys and girls in each of the two grade samples. Children were assigned to skilled and less skilled reading ability groups on the basis of median split performance on the St. Lucia Graded Word Reading Test, designed and normed for Australian children (Andrews, 1969). Sample characteristics are provided in Table 1. Materials Syntactic awareness tasks. Two parallel sets of 30 ungrammatical sentences were constructed. The sentences ranged in length between 3 and 10 words, with an average sentence length of 5.7 words. Most of the test grammatical errors are “natural,” being observed in the speech of younger children. The grammatical structures and the rules required to correct them have been acquired by children of the age range studied. One set of these sentences is presented in Appendix A.

288

JUDITH A. BOWEY TABLE

1

MEAN CHRONOLOGICAL AGE, READING AGE (ANDREWS, 1969). AND VOCABULARY ACNE (DUNN & DUNN, 1981) IN MONTHS, AS A FUNCTION OF GRADE AND DECODING SKILL GROUP

Group Fourth grade Less skilled Skilled Fifth grade Less skilled Skilled

RA range, in months

CA

RA

VA

95-I 17 120-156

117.25 115.83

106.00 137.08

105.17 142.25

95-137 141-156

130.25 129.67

118.08 148.50

142.92 151.58

Note. The relatively high mean VA for the less skilled fifth-grade sample is attributable to the exceptionally high raw score of 159 obtained by the best decoder within this group, giving a VA score of 367 months. The mean VA of the less skilled fifth graders, excluding this subject, was 122.55.

Oral reading. A 539-word passage from Tales of Tuttle (MacLeod, 1980) was selected as the reading material. This passage, the beginning of a chapter entitled “The Parcel-Wrapping Machine,” forms a story in itself. It is of 3.4 grade level readability, according to the Spache (1953) formula, with Stone’s (1956) modification. Procedure Preliminary testing. On separate occasions, children were given two standardized group tests of reading comprehension, the fourth-grade Progressive Achievement Test ofReading Comprehension (Australian Council for Educational Research, 1973) and the Gap Reading Comprehension Test (McLeod, 1967). The former is a 40-min test of silent reading comprehension, assessed using multiple choice items. The Gap test is a 15min test based on the cloze procedure. Following the group sessions, children were given two individual sessions. In the first, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Form M-Dunn & Dunn, 1981) was given. In the second, the St. Lucia Graded Word Reading Test (Andrew% 1969) was administered. Syntactic awareness. Syntactic awareness was assessed by examining performance on two parallel tasks, error imitation and error correction, each individually administered. Task order and test form were counterbalanced and randomly assigned. In both tasks children were informed that all of the sentences they would hear contained a “mistake,” so that they sounded “wrong.” In the error imitation task they were required to repeat the sentence exactly as they heard it, leaving the mistake in. In the error correction task they were asked to fix the sentence up, to say the sentence the “right” way. Children were introduced to the error imitation task as follows:

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Today, everything that I say will be wrong, with a mistake in it, so that it will sound wrong. But I want you to leave the mistake in, and say it back to me exactly the same way as I say it. Don’t change it. If you don’t hear me properly, just ask me to say it again. Here are some practice ones, to make sure that you know what to do. Just say them back to me the same way that you hear them, with the mistake left in.

Children were then given three practice items, with corrective feedback where necessary. Any practice item that was incorrectly repeated was readministered before the test items were commenced. Children were introduced to the error correction task as follows: This part is different. This time I want you to fix up what I say. I’11 keep saying everything with a mistake in it. I want you to say them the way I should have said them. I’ll say them the wrong way, and you say them the right way. If you don’t hear me, ask me to say it again. I’ll give you some practice ones to make sure that you know what to do. Fix this up.

Three practice items were given. If the child did not correct the error, the item was repeated. If the child still failed to correct it, the corrected version was given and explained. The child was then to repeat that corrected answer. These items were repeated at the end of the practice trials to ensure that the child understood the task. Throughout both of these tasks items were spoken clearly, at a natural rate, and with normal intonation. In both tasks the children could request that an item be repeated if they did not hear it properly. Whenever a child made two consecutive errors he was reminded of the task requirements. For instance, in the error imitation task he would be reminded to say the same thing as he heard, and not to change anything. Some responses in the error correction task constituted paraphrases. A response was defined as a paraphrase if the child changed either the basic structure or the meaning of an item to the extent that it could not be unambiguously determined whether the correction of the grammatical error was deliberate or incidental to the paraphrase. When a child produced a paraphrase, he was told that there was another way of fixing that item, and asked to try to think of the other way. If a second paraphrase was produced, the item was left, and repeated at the end of the test. Oral reading rusk. Children were again tested individually. Children were given reading instructions comparable to those used by Isakson and Miller (1976). Children were given the reading material, and asked to read it as well as they could. They were told that the experimenter would not give any help, so that if they came to a hard word they should try to work it out themselves. If they could not do so, they were advised to guess at it or leave it out. Before reading the prose selection, children were informed that after they had read the story they would be asked

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to retell it and to answer some questions about it. This ensured that they would attempt to comprehend the passage as they read it. Although informally tested, children’s comprehension of the story was not formally assessed for two reasons (1) there are large individual differences in the length of children’s retelling of stories which arguably reflect personality rather than comprehension factors, and (2) text recall following oral reading incorporates a substantial memory component (see Bowey, 1982). RESULTS Syntactic Awareness

Responses were defined as correct if they conformed with task requirements. Thus, a response in the error imitation task was regarded as correct if it maintained the grammatical error. In the error correction task a response was regarded as correct if the grammatical error was unambiguously corrected. Interrater reliability of scoring children’s responses to these tasks was demonstrated in a previous study, with 98% agreement between two raters in the error imitation task, and 97% agreement in the error correction task (Bowey, 1986). A three-way, Grade x Group x Task, analysis of variance was carried out on performance on the two syntactic awareness subtasks. This revealed significant main effects for group, F(I, 44) = 34.86, p < .OOl, and task, F(1, 44) = 8.99, p < .Ol. Table 2 indicates that skilled readers performed at a higher level than less skilled readers and that the error imitation task was easier than the error correction task. Grade was not significant, F(1, 44) = 1.74, p > .05. The only significant interaction was that of Grade x Group x Task, F(1, 44) = 4.00, p < .OS, reflecting ceiling ease performance by the fifth-grade skilled readers (see Table 2). All two-way interactions were nonsignificant: Group x Grade, F < I; Grade x Task, F < 1; and Group x Task, F( 1, 44) = 1.43, p > .05. A two-way, Grade x Group, analysis of covariance was performed on “syntactic control” scores, the percentage difference between the number of corrections made on the error correction and error imitation TABLE MEAN

PERFORMANCE

2

IN THE SYNTACTIC AWARENESS TASKS DECODING SKILL

AS A FUNCTION

AND

Fifth grade

Fourth grade

Task Error correction Error imitation Syntactic control

OF GRADE

Less skilled

Skilled

Less skilled

Skilled

82.73 87.22 70.00

89.73 96.40 86.13

82.23 89.45 71.68

91.22 95.56 92.78

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tasks, with PPVT-R vocabulary age entered as a covariate. Vocabulary age was highly significant, F(1,43) = 13.29,~ < .OOl. Group was significant, F(I) 43) = 29.09, p < .OOl, with skilled readers showing superior syntactic control relative to less skilled readers (see Table 2). Grade was nonsignificant, F < 1. The Group x Grade interaction was also nonsignificant, F(1, 43) = 1.33, p > .05. Correlations between Syntactic Awareness and Other Measures

Correlational analyses were carried out to examine the relationship between error imitation, error correction, syntactic control, and the reading measures. These included performance on the two standardized tests of reading comprehension, decoding ability, overall prose reading error rate, and, most importantly, the four qualitative measures of oral reading performance obtained from a corpus of 1853 errors (Bowey, 1985): 1. The rate of contextually acceptable reading errors, being the number of contextually acceptable reading errors expressed as a proportion of the total number of prose reading errors. A contextually acceptable reading error was defined as any audible misreading which was both grammatically and semantically acceptable within both the prior story context and the sentence being read. Repetitions, stumblings, and self-corrections were thus contextually acceptable, as were semantically and syntactically acceptable substitutions, insertions, and omissions. Incorrect pronunciations of proper nouns were also defined as contextually acceptable. 2. The rate of reading responses violating prior story and sentence context as they were first articulated, expressed as a proportion of the total number of prose reading errors. 3. The rate of contextually obligatory self-corrections, being the number of contextually unacceptable errors that were self-corrected, expressed as a proportion of the total number of reading responses which, as first uttered, were contextually unacceptable in the prior story and surrounding sentence context. 4. The rate of contextually optional self-corrections, being the number of reading errors which were already contextually acceptable in terms of the prior story and surrounding sentence context, but which were subsequently self-corrected, expressed as a proportion of the total number of this type of error.

Interrater

reliabilities for these four measures ranged between 88.4 and 1985). The resulting zero-order correlation matrix is presented in Table 3. The only variable to show a consistent pattern of nonsignificant correlations was, as expected, the rate of contextually optional self-corrections. This measure was assumed to measure a grapheme-monitoring self-correction strategy, and was included to provide a check that the contextually obligatory self-correction rate reflected a comprehension- (or context-) monitoring strategy, rather than a grapheme-monitoring strategy. Further analyses examined the correlations between the experimental measures of syntactic awareness and reading performance, partialing out 93.8% (Bowey,

.40**

- .27* .33* .02 .49*** .30* .43*** - .22

.53***

- .38**

.53***

.65*** .30* .4s*** - .42+*

.08

.33*

.73***

B

.69*** .91***

A

.12 .56*** .22 .35** - .42**

SO***

- .34**

a***

.92*** .41**

C

- .Ol .77*** -16 .41** -a***

.88***

- .82***

.59*** .41*** .52***

D

-.21 - .40** .30*

.16 -*&j***

-*j&f**

- .a***

- .47*+* - .36** - .42***

E

.I7 .72*** .ll .41** - .55***

- .63***

J37***

s3*** .35** .52***

F

** p < .Ol. *** p i .ool.

* p < .os.

’ Holding PPVT-R vocabulary age effects constant. Partial correlations are in boldface type.

A Syntactic control B Error imitation C Error correction D Rate of contextually acceptable errors E Rate of errors violating prior context 3 F Rate of contextually obligatory b-2 self-corrections G Rate of contextually optional selfcorrections H Decoding skill I Silent reading comprehension J Gap (cloze) reading comprehension K Prose reading error rate L PPVT-R vocabulary age

Code variable

.O!J .02 36 - .26*

.18

.13

.Ol

.13

.lO c.01

G

.40** .70*** - .74***

.lO

.62*** - .24

.04 .53***

.16

- ,35**

- ,70*** .70**+

.30*

.43*** .47**+ .37**

I

.80***

Jj2***

.71*** .57***

H

TABLE 3 ZERO- AND FIRST-ORDERSCORRELATIONCOEFFICIENTSOBSERVEDAMONG EXPE~UMENTAL MEASURES

- .56***

.07 .74*** x58***

,42t**

- .48***

,4g***

.39**

,52***

-

.26* .78*** .36** .61**

- ,56***

-

- .32* -.49*x*

- .5()***

,53*** .50*** .42***

K

J

--.-

.05 .46*** .45*** .35** - .35**

.13

- .38**

.34**

.39** .34** .33*

L

SYNTACTIC

AWARENESS TABLE

293

AND READING 4

PARTIAL CORRELATIONS BETWEEN MEASURES OF SYNTACTIC AWARENESS AND PROSE ORAL READING (CONTROLLING FOR PROSE ERROR RATE AND PPVT-R VOCABULARY AGE EFFECTS)

Controlling

for the effects of Prose error rate and PPVT-R vocabulary age

Prose error rate

Rate of contextually acceptable errors Rate of errors violating prior context Rate of contextually obligatory selfcorrections Rate of contextually optional selfcorrections

Error imitation

Error correction

Syntactic control

.38**

.35**

.44***

- .27*

- .29**

- .34**

.22

.34**

.3ti**

-.09

.Ol

- .04

Error imitation .35**

Error correction

Syntactic control

.33**

.41**

- .22

- .25*

- .29*

.25*

.36**

.39**

- .08

.Ol

- .03

* p < .05. ** p < .Ol. *** p i .ool

the effects of PPVT-R vocabulary age. The results are presented in Table 3. The first-order correlational data revealed that the relationship between syntactic control and the three measures of ongoing reading comprehension processing remained significant when vocabulary age effects were statistically controlled. Since ongoing reading comprehension and comprehension-monitoring performance decreases as text decoding difficulty increases (Stanovich, 1980; see also Table 3), further partial correlations were computed for the oral reading measures, controlling for the effects of subjective text decoding difficulty, as reflected in the overall prose error rate. Table 4 presents partial correlations between error imitation, error correction, and syntactic control measures and the four qualitative oral reading measures, with prose error rate (and PPVT-R vocabulary age) effects controlled. These data reveal that syntactic awareness, as predicted, maintained a significant relationship with the rate of contextually acceptable reading errors, the rate of errors violating prior context, and the rate of contextually obligatory self-corrections. DISCUSSION Skilled and less skilled readers, as defined by word decoding skill, differed significantly on the experimental measure of grammatical aware-

294

JUDlTH

A. BOWEY

ness, syntactic control. This is an important finding, given both the nonsignificant grade effect and earlier work indicating that, following dramatic improvements from nursery level to second grade, performance on this measure of syntactic awareness does not increase significantly from second to fifth grade (Bowey, 1986). This suggests that the difference between skilled and less skilled decoders may represent a substantial delay in the development of syntactic awareness. The analysis of covariance showed that the correlation between syntactic control and decoding skill remained significant when the effects of general verbal ability, as reflected in PPVT-R vocabulary age, were statistically controlled. This finding is consistent with previous work demonstrating a correlation between syntactic control and decoding skill in a sample of 88 first- to fifth-grade children, with grade and PPVT-R vocabulary age effects statistically controlled (Bowey, 1986). The strong correlation observed between syntactic control and decoding skill is not explicable solely in terms of their common relationship with reading comprehension performance. Such an account would predict that syntactic control would be more strongly correlated with reading comprehension than with decoding skill. However, inspection of Table 3, confirmed by statistical analysis (J. Cohen & P. Cohen, 1975), revealed that the reverse was true. Syntactic control correlated more highly with decoding skill than with either silent reading comprehension t(45) = 2.76, p < .Ol, or Gap (cloze) reading comprehension, t(45) = 2.37, p < .05. (Error correction performance was also more highly correlated with decoding skill relative to both silent reading comprehension, t(45) = 2.23, p < .05, and Gap (cloze) reading comprehension, t(45) = 2.38, p < .05. There was no significant difference in the strength of correlations between error imitation and decoding relative to either comprehension measure, t < 1 in both cases.) These findings do not reflect differential reliability of the three reading tests used, as all have reliability coefficients ranging from .83 to .95, as reported in the test manuals. Sine the maximum validity coefficient is the square root of the reliability coefficient (Anastasi, 1982), differences in maximum correlation coefficients obtainable vary from .91 to .97, an insufficient range to account for the current results. The finding that syntactic awareness is more strongly correlated with decoding than with comprehension skill appears at first sight counterintuitive. Theoretical speculation concerning the contribution of syntactic awareness to the reading process is highly limited, but it would appear to contribute directly to text integration rather than to decoding processes (see Tunmer & Bowey, 1984). This view is, in fact, supported by the partial correlation data presented in Table 4. These data show that, with subjective text decoding difficulty (and PPVT-R) effects statistically controlled, syntactic awareness retained significant correlations with measures

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of ongoing reading comprehension (rate of contextually acceptable reading errors and rate of errors violating prior context) and ongoing comprehension monitoring (rate of contextually obligatory self-corrections). Nevertheless, it is clear that the strong correlation between syntactic control and decoding skill cannot be explained solely in terms of the mediation of comprehension ability. We must look elsewhere. One interpretation is that decoding skill and syntactic awareness are both partial or indirect measures of a common higher-order language ability. It is, in fact, likely that both decoding skill and syntactic awareness are correlated with a general metalinguistic ability factor. This suggestion is consistent with prior research. Decoding skill is correlated with phonemic awareness and word awareness (see Tunmer & Bowey, 19&t), and different aspects of metalinguistic skill are themselves intercorrelated (Hakes, Evans, & Tunmer, 1980; Smith 8z Tager-Flusberg, 1982). To the extent that decoding skill and syntactic awareness are both correlated with other aspects of metalinguistic ability, such as phonemic awareness and word awareness, they would themselves be intercorrelated (with PPVT-R effects controlled). It is also possible that both decoding skill and syntactic awareness are correlated with some other underlying factor, such as a general cognitive factor (see Hakes et al., 1980) or general language proficiency (see Smith & Tager-Flusberg, 1982). Multivariate research, examining a range of metalinguistic, cognitive, and general language proficiency measures in relation to reading proficiency, is required to distinguish among these interpretations of the correlation between decoding skill and syntactic awareness. Such a study would also add considerably to our understanding of metalinguistic ability. An alternative explanation for the correlation observed between decoding skill and syntactic awareness (with general verbal ability effects controlled) is that literacy itself promotes the development of syntactic awareness. It is conceivable that in learning to read (and write), children are explicitly taught to monitor the acceptability of their rendition of the text (see Goodman & Burke, 1972) and that this stimulates the development of syntactic awareness. Similar arguments have been made concerning the contribution of literacy to phonemic awareness (e.g., Ehri & Wilce, 1980; Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979). There does not appear to be any means of choosing among these interpretations of the association between syntactic awareness and decoding skill. However, comparisons of less skilled readers with younger readers matched on decoding skills and with general verbal ability effects controlled would clarify this issue. Such a design would overcome the interpretative problem of the current study-if poor readers showed lower levels of syntactic awareness than younger, equally skilled readers, then we would conclude that deficient syntactic awareness may contribute to, rather

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than result from, low reading achievement (see Backman, Mamen, & Ferguson, 1984). The second experimental hypothesis, that syntactic awareness is correlated with measures of ongoing reading comprehension monitoring, was examined by correlating syntactic control scores with measures of ongoing reading performance obtained from Bowey (1985) and with standardized measures of reading comprehension. The results indicated that syntactic control was indeed correlated with both sets of measures, even with PPVT-R and, where appropriate, prose error rate effects statistically controlled. These findings suggest that less skilled readers’ problems in reading comprehension and in comprehension-monitoring tasks (Garner, 1980; Kotsonis & Patterson, 1980) may reflect a basic deficiency in languagemonitoring skills. Taken as a whole, the results of the present experiment suggest that less skilled readers are indeed delayed relative to skilled readers in their ability to monitor the grammatical well formedness of aurally presented sentences, and that this delay is associated both with their relative failure to monitor ongoing comprehension within an oral reading task and with their overall difficulties with reading comprehension. It is likely that syntactic awareness may play a direct role in reading comprehension through the operation of efficient comprehension-monitoring skills. Readers who are able to monitor comprehension failure as it occurs can locate the sources of comprehension difficulty and are thus more likely to correct such problems (see Markman, 1981). The present findings that less skilled decoders’ difficulties with ongoing comprehension monitoring are not restricted to written language tasks, but are also evident in oral language tasks, and that syntactic awareness is correlated with ongoing reading comprehension monitoring suggest that teaching children to monitor semantic and syntactic consistency within oral tasks may directly facilitate reading comprehension. This suggestion is indirectly supported by Weaver’s (1979) finding that teaching third graders written sentence organization skills resulted in improved comprehension performance. Although further research is required to demonstrate that oral syntactic awareness can be successfully taught, and that it transfers to the reading task, the likely economies of instructional time in teaching syntactic awareness orally suggest that this type of intervention is worthy of consideration. A minor methodological postscript should be added concerning the utility of experimentally controlling for the effect of “spontaneous” corrections when using a grammatical error correction task as an index of syntactic awareness. This is strongly indicated by the more consistent pattern of significant correlations shown by the corrected, syntactic control, measure relative to error imitation and error correction performance in Tables 3 and 4. Higher consistency of the syntactic control measure was

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also reported by Bowey (1986). Nevertheless, both error imitation and error correction performance provide reasonable estimates of syntactic awareness, as revealed by the two correlational analyses (see Tables 3 and 4). This finding is particularly interesting in view of the extremely high level of error imitation performance observed. These significant correlations are consistent with the earlier suggestion that “spontaneous” corrections in the error imitation task may indicate failure to detect grammatical errors, such that error imitation performance constitutes an indirect measure of syntactic awareness. These data suggest that the corrected syntactic control measure constitutes the purest measure of syntactic awareness in a grammatical error correction paradigm. APPENDIX

A

Form A of the Syntactic Awareness Task Practice items 1. John running is. 2. The dog chase a cat. 3. The girl wore a dress white. Test items 1. Have you seen Mary orange pencil? 2. Bill is more smaller than Bob. 3. Where does this goes? 4. They was going to the beach. 5. Jane saw two horse. 6. The girl she could read. 7. The boy show you what to do. 8. I know what them are. 9. She hasn’t got no pencils. 10. The boy jumped over log. 11. Tom is climb a tree. 12. I am knowing the answer. 13. We haven’t got some icecream. 14. The boy found the book what you lost. 15. He cleaned them shoes. 16. Look at the cat cleaning hisself. 17. She will be cross if you will break it. 18. The teacher the story read to the children. 19. We’re having fun, are we? 20. What the girls are doing? 21. The girl took off her shoes off. 22. John and Tom is a brother. 23. Yesterday Steven eat a whole pineapple. 24. The girl lost her money who lives across the road. 25. Peter goes sometimes to church. 26. I can do that either. 21. Paul gave an apple for Susan. 28. I wonder how old is he. 29. Clean it up that mess. 30. They came Adelaide.

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Australian Council for Educational Research (1973). Progressive Achievement Tests. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research. Backman, J. E., Mamen, M., 62 Ferguson, H. B. (1984). Reading level design: Conceptual and methodological issues in reading research. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 560-568. Bowey, J. A. (1982). Memory limitations in the oral reading comprehension of fourthgrade children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 34, 200-216. Bowey, J. A. (1984). The interaction of strategy and context in children’s oral reading performance. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 13, 99-l 17. Bowey, J. A. (1985). Contextual facilitation in children’s oral reading in relation to grade and decoding skill. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 40, 23-48. Bowey, J. A. (1986). Syntactic awareness and verbal performance from preschool to fifth grade. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 15, in press. Clay, M. M. (1968). A syntactic analysis of reading errors. Journal of Verbal Learning and

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Spache, G. (1953). A new readability formula for primary-grade reading materials. Elementary School Journal, 53, 410-413. Stanovich, K. E. (1980). Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 32-11. Stone, C. R. (1956). Measuring difficulty of primary reading material: A constructive criticism of Spache’s measure. Elementary School Journal, 57, 36-41. Tunmer, W. E., & Bowey, .I. A. (1984). Metalinguistic awareness and reading acquisition. In W. E. Tunmer, C. Pratt, &M. L. Herriman (Eds.), Language awareness in children: Theory, research and implications (pp. 144-168). New York: Springer-Verlag. Vogel, S. A. (1975). Synfactic abilities in normal and dyslexic children. Baltimore, MD: Univ. Park Press. Weaver, P. A. (1979). Improving reading comprehension: Effects of sentence organization instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 15, 130-146. Weber, R. M. (1970). First-graders’ use of grammatical context in reading. In H. Levin & J. P. Williams (Eds.), Basic studies in reading (pp. 147-163). New York: Basic Books. Whaley, J. F., & Kibby, M. W. (1981). The relative importance of reliance on intraword characteristics and interword constraints for beginning reading achievement. Journal of Educational Research, 74, 31.5-320. RECEIVED:

December 10, 1984;

REVISED

September 3, 1985, December 3. 1985.