Prepositional Phrases,Pronominalization,Reflexivization,and Relativization in the Language of Learning Disabled College Students

Abstract

The present study evaluated and compared the knowledge and application of selected syntactic rules for forming (1) spatial, temporal, and idiomatic prepositional phrases, (2) pronominalization, (3) reflexivization, and (4) relativization in 26 learning disabled and 13 academically achieving college students. The experimental test battery contained seven written, multiple-choice tests, six of which were designed by Quigley (1971). The LD college students performed significantly poorer than their controls on tasks requiring (1) application of the selectional rules for reflexive pronouns plural, (2) recognition of the grammaticality of relativized sentences, (3) resolution of relativized sentences into their component sentences, and synthesis of component sentences into relativized sentences. The present findings suggest that syntactic deficits may persist among LD young adults who have achieved college status. They further suggest that the deficits in acquiring the rules for forming complex sentence transformations do not recover spontaneously among these young adults as a function of age related maturational processes or exposure to more advanced reading materials.

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