Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) tend to interpret noncanonical sentences like passives using event probability (EP) information regardless of structure (e.g., by interpreting "The dog was chased by the squirrel" as "The dog chased the squirrel"). Verbs are a major source of EP information in adults…

Comprehension is a primary ingredient of reading success--but most educators aren't taught how to deliver structured comprehension instruction in their classrooms. K-8 teachers will find the guidance they need in this groundbreaking professional resource from Nancy Hennessy, former IDA President and an expert on reading comprehension. Meticulously…

Given the fact that the role of syntactic awareness skills on the acquisition of reading skills, we can see how important it is for children to acquire such skills and to solve the relevant problems. This study analyzes the syntactic comprehension skills of students diagnosed with dyslexia. A total of 50 students with dyslexia, 25 in fourth grade…

Purpose: The nature of the relationship between memory and sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has been unclear. We present a novel perspective that highlights the relational influences of fluid intelligence, controlled attention, working memory (WM), and long-term memory (LTM) on sentence…

It has long been considered that the Mandarin possessive reflexive "zijide" can be either locally bound or long distance bound, leading to ambiguity where it fails to exclusively refer back to either long distance binding NP or the local NP. In addition to syntactic factors such as the local versus long distance division, the present…

This dissertation probes children's metalinguistic awareness of syntactic ambiguity (as in the sentence "The man is poking the monkey with a banana," where the PP "with a banana" can be understood in two ways, associated with either the monkey or the poking). Several studies suggest that children do not spontaneously detect…

Fragile X syndrome is the leading inherited cause of intellectual disability. Most boys with fragile X syndrome have impaired cognition and language deficits, with significant within-syndrome variability. Syntax may be especially delayed relative to nonverbal cognition; however, little is known about the specificity of delay, the sources of that…

This paper examines two- to five-year-old children's knowledge of inversion in English yes/no questions through a new experimental study. It challenges the view that the syntax for inversion develops slowly in child English and tests the hypothesis that grammatical competence for inversion is present from the earliest testable ages of the child's…