Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017)…

The components involved in adolescent reading are complex and not clearly understood in struggling readers. Phrase reading, a language skill associated with prosodic understanding of syntactic phrases, has received little attention. We studied 70 adolescent readers including delayed readers to answer the following questions: (a) Do phrase-reading…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

We used Barton and Sanford's (1993) anomaly detection task to investigate text processing differences between skilled and less-skilled readers. The results of 2 experiments showed that many readers had the tendency to process text in a shallow or incomplete manner, frequently failing to detect anomalous nouns or noun phrases (NPs) in text such as…

Testing of deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language suggests that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate good from poor deaf readers, but rather a processing deficit may underlie poor readers' comprehension difficulties. (Author/CB)