Syntactic awareness and reading ability: is there any evidence for a special relationship?

Cain, Kate (2007) Syntactic awareness and reading ability: is there any evidence for a special relationship? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28 (4). pp. 679-694. ISSN 1469-1817

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Abstract

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension (Tunmer & Bowey, 1984). The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in eight- and ten-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed. After vocabulary, memory explained variance on the word-order correction task; in contrast grammatical knowledge explained performance on the grammatical correction task. The relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension was mediated by vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory; in contrast, word reading and syntactic awareness shared unique variance not explained by these controls. The implications for how we measure syntactic awareness and its relation with reading ability are discussed.