This study was designed to determine the contributions of metalinguistic skill and psycholinguistic processing ability to children's ability to detect the ambiguity of sentences and the relationship among all three factors to early reading ability. A total of 20 first graders and 20 second graders were given tasks testing the following abilities: ambiguity detection, conservation, lexical processing, and reading comprehension. Although intercorrelations among all four tasks were highly significant, regression analyses indicate independent contributions of processing and metalinguistic skills to ambiguity detection, which is, in turn, the sole predictor of reading comprehension. A developmental sequence is hypothesized. The authors suggest that ambiguity detection can be used to identify children who are at risk for reading failure and that training in ambiguity detection can be used in reading-readiness training and as an intervention tool.
Adams, M., Foorman, B., Lundberg, I., & Beeler, C. (1998). Phonemic awareness in young children: A classroom curriculum. Baltimore: Brookes.
2.
Ball, E.W., & Blachman, B.A. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 49-66.
3.
Bentin, S., Deutsch, A., & Liberman, I.Y. (1990). Syntactic competence and reading ability in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 48, 147-172.
4.
Blachman, B. (1997). Early intervention and phonological awareness: A cautionary tale. In B. Blachman (Ed.), Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia: Implications for early intervention (pp. 409-430). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
5.
Bohannon, J.N., Warren-Leubecker, A., & Hepler, N. (1984). Word-order awareness and early reading. Child Development, 55, 1541-1548.
6.
Bradley, L., & Bryant, P. (1983). Categorizing sounds and learning to read: A causal connection. Nature, 301, 419-421.
7.
Cairns, H.S. (1999). Psycholinguistics: An introduction. Austin: TX: PRO-ED.
8.
Cairns, H.S., Schlisselberg, G., Waltzman, D.E., & McDaniel, D. (2006). Development of metalinguistic skill: judging the grammaticality of sentences. Communication Disorders Quarterly , 27(4), 213-220.
9.
Cairns, H.S., Waltzman, D.E., & Schlisselberg, G. (2004). Detecting the ambiguity of sentences: relationship to early reading. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 25(2), 68-78.
10.
Dapretto, M., & Bjork, E.L. (2000). The development of word retrieval abilities in the second year and its relation to vocabulary growth. Child Development, 71, 635-648.
11.
Dermont, E., & Gombert, J.E. (1996). Phonological awareness as a predictor of recoding skills and syntactic awareness as a predictor of comprehension skills. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 66, 315-332.
12.
Dunn, L.M., & Dunn, L.M. (1981) Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.
13.
Fowler, A.E. (1988). Grammaticality judgments and reading skill in Grade 2. Annals of Dyslexia, 38, 73-94.
14.
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J.D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model . Cognition, 6, 291-325.
15.
Frommer, M.S. (1975) The influence of linguistic context on the processing of lexically ambiguous sentences by four, six, and eight year old children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, ColumbiaTeachers College , New York.
16.
Gillon, G.T. (2005). Facilitating phoneme awareness development in 3- and 4-year-old children with speech impairment. Language Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools, 36, 4, 308-324.
Gough, P.B., & Tunmer, W.E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6-10.
19.
Hakes, D. (1980). The development of metalinguistic abilities in children. New York: Springer.
20.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Gleitman, L.R., & Gleitman, H. (1978). What did the brain say to the mind? A study of the detection and report of ambiguity by young children. In A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella , & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), The child's conception of language (pp. 97-132). New York: Springer-Verlag.
21.
Hogan, T.P., Catts, H.W., & Little, T.D. (2005). The relationship between phonological awareness and reading: Implications for the assessment of phonological awareness. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools, 36(4), 285-293.
22.
Hoover, W., & Gough, P.B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127-160.
23.
Love, T., Swinney, D., Bagdasaryan, S., & Prather, P. (1999, March). Real-time processing of lexical ambiguities . Paper presented at the 12th annual City University of New York conference on human sentence processing.
24.
Mitchell, D.C. (1994). Sentence parsing. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 375-410). New York: Academic Press.
25.
Nation, K., & Snowling, M.J. (2000). Factors influencing syntactic awareness skills in normal readers and poor comprehenders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 229-241.
26.
Peters, A.M., & Zaidel, E. (1980). The acquisition of homonymy. Cognition, 8, 197-207.
27.
Pratt, C., Tunmer, W.E., & Bowey, J.A. (1984) Children's capacity to correct grammatical violations in sentences. Journal of Child Language, 11, 129-141.
28.
Pritchett, B.L. (1988). Garden path phenomena and the grammatical basis of language processing. Language, 64, 539-576.
29.
Pritchett, B.L. (1992). Grammatical competence and parsing performance . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
30.
Schlisselberg, G. (1988). Development of selected conservation skills and the ability to judge sentential well-formedness in young children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York.
31.
Scholl, D.M., & Ryan, E.B. (1980). Development of metalinguistic performance in the early school years. Language and Speech, 23(Pt. 2), 199-211.
32.
Shakibai, M.T. (2008). The efficacy of a training program to teach kindergarteners lexical ambiguity detection. Unpublished dissertation, City University of New York.
33.
Simpson, G.B. (1994). Context and the processing of ambiguous words . In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 375-410). New York: Academic Press.
34.
Swinney, D. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)Consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 645-659.
35.
Swinney, D., & Prather, P. (1989). On the comprehension of lexical ambiguity in young children: Investigations into the development of mental modularity. In D. Gorfein (Ed.), Resolving semantic ambiguity (pp. 225-238). Berlin: Springer-Verlag .
36.
Torgesen, J.K. (1999). Assessment and instruction for phonemic awareness and word recognition skills. In H. W. Catts & A. G. Kamhi (Eds.), Language and reading disabilities (pp. 128-153). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
37.
Tunmer, W.E., Herriman, M.L., & Nesdale, A.R. (1988). Metalinguistic abilities and beginning reading .Reading Research Quarterly, 2, 134-158.
38.
Tunmer, W.E., & Hoover, W.A. (1992). Cognitive and linguistic factors in learning to read. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 175-214) Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
39.
van Kleek, A., & Reddick, C. (1982, October). The relationship between concrete operational thought and development of metalinguistic skill. Paper presented at the sevnth annual Boston University conference on language development, Boston.
40.
Wankoff, L.S. (1983). Selected metalinguistic variables as they relate to conservation and reading achievement in normal-achieving and some learning-disabled children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York.
41.
Woodcock, R.W. (1973) Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.
42.
Zipke, M. (2006). Metalinguistic instruction improves third graders' reading comprehension. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York Graduate School.
43.
Zipke, M., Ehri, L., & Cairns, H.S. (2008). Metalinguistic instruction improves third graders' reading comprehension. Manuscript in preparation.
