Szterman Ronit, Friedmann Naama
Language and Brain Lab, Sagol School of Neuroscience and School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 699787, Israel.
Division of Special Education, Ministry of Education Israel, Jerusalem 9510402, Israel.
Brain Sci. 2020 Nov 23;10(11):896. doi: 10.3390/brainsci10110896.
Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children show difficulties in reading aloud and comprehension of texts. Here, we examined the hypothesis that these reading difficulties are tightly related to the syntactic deficit displayed by DHH children. We first assessed the syntactic abilities of 32 DHH children communicating in spoken language (Hebrew) aged 9;1-12;2. We classified them into two groups of DHH children-with and without a syntactic deficit according to their performance in six syntactic tests assessing their comprehension and production of sentences with syntactic movement. We also assessed their reading at the single word level using a reading aloud test of words, nonwords, and word pairs, designed to detect the various types of dyslexia, and established, for each participant, whether they had dyslexia and of what type. Following this procedure, 14 of the children were identified with a syntactic deficit, and 15 with typical syntax (3 marginally impaired); 22 of the children had typical reading at the word level, and 4 had dyslexia (3 demonstrated sublexical reading). The main experiment examined reading aloud and comprehension of 6 texts with syntactic movement (which contained, e.g., relative clauses and topicalized sentences), in comparison to 6 parallel texts without movement. The results indicated a close connection between syntactic difficulties and errors in reading aloud and in comprehension of texts. The DHH children with syntactic deficit made significantly more errors in reading aloud and more comprehension errors than the DHH children with intact syntax (and than the hearing controls), even though most of them did not have dyslexia at the word level. The DHH children with syntactic deficit made significantly more reading errors when they read texts with syntactic movement than on matched texts without movement. These results indicate that difficulties in text reading, manifesting both in errors in reading aloud and in impaired comprehension, may stem from a syntactic deficit and may occur even when reading at the word level is completely intact.
聋哑和重听（DHH）儿童在朗读和文本理解方面存在困难。在此，我们检验了这样一种假设，即这些阅读困难与DHH儿童表现出的句法缺陷密切相关。我们首先评估了32名年龄在9岁1个月至12岁2个月、以口语（希伯来语）交流的DHH儿童的句法能力。根据他们在六项句法测试中的表现，我们将他们分为两组DHH儿童——有句法缺陷组和无句法缺陷组，这六项句法测试用于评估他们对带有句法移位的句子的理解和生成能力。我们还使用单词、非单词和单词对的朗读测试在单词层面评估了他们的阅读能力，该测试旨在检测各种类型的诵读困难，并为每位参与者确定他们是否患有诵读困难以及属于何种类型。按照这个程序，14名儿童被确定存在句法缺陷，15名儿童句法正常（3名有轻微损伤）；22名儿童在单词层面阅读正常，4名儿童患有诵读困难（3名表现为亚词汇阅读）。主要实验比较了6篇带有句法移位的文本（例如包含关系从句和主题化句子）与6篇平行的无移位文本的朗读和理解情况。结果表明，句法困难与朗读错误和文本理解错误之间存在密切联系。有句法缺陷的DHH儿童在朗读和理解方面比句法正常的DHH儿童（以及听力正常的对照组）犯的错误明显更多，尽管他们中的大多数在单词层面没有诵读困难。有句法缺陷的DHH儿童在阅读带有句法移位的文本时比阅读匹配的无移位文本时犯的阅读错误明显更多。这些结果表明，文本阅读困难，表现为朗读错误和理解受损，可能源于句法缺陷，并且即使在单词层面阅读完全正常时也可能出现。
