Examining the Sentence Comprehension Skills of Students with and without Reading Difficulties

The present study was designed to compare the sentence comprehension skills of students with and without reading difficulties. Participants were 35 readers with specific reading difficulties and a control of 51 normally developing readers selected from two distinct levels of education (3rd-4th graders = elementary; 6th-7th graders = junior-high). We applied an experimental paradigm manipulating the semantic plausibility and syntactic complexity of sentences to compare reading comprehension skills of readers at the sentence level. In line with findings reported for their sentence comprehension performance, the participants with reading difficulties manifested rather alarmingly impoverished sentence comprehension skills in comparison to their normally developing counterparts. The findings suggest that this reading failure is rooted in an apparent deficiency in the ability to recruit word processing and syntactic knowledge to make sense of what they read. Evidence for the present study is discussed with reference to these factors (word processing and syntactic knowledge) that may explain the existence of their reading comprehension deficits.