Syntactic awareness and reading acquisition

Abstract

Although previous studies have demonstrated that syntactic awareness is related to beginning reading achievement, the direction of causation remains a matter of dispute. Our study employed a reading level design in which good, younger readers were matched with poor, older readers on four measures of reading ability (real word recognition, pseudo‐word naming, reading fluency, and reading comprehension) and verbal intelligence. It was found that the good, younger readers scored significantly better than the poor, older readers on two measures of syntactic awareness, one an oral cloze task and the other an oral correction task. The findings suggest that the older, poor readers were developmentally delayed in syntactic awareness and that this delay may have retarded reading development.