The Contribution of Syntactic and Para-Syntactic Cues in the Comprehension of Spoken and Written Language. Final Report

Two studies were conducted with English speakers to investigate (1) the facilitative effects of melodic features of speech, and (2) whether poor readers (without evidence of sensory defect) show a greater impairment than good readers when melodic features are made unavailable in the speech input. It was hypothesized that when melodic cues are not available, sentences of high syntactic complexity are harder to process than sentences of lower syntactic complexity. A modification of the Savin and Perchonock (1965) "overflow" procedure was employed. An auditory verbal stimulus was presented, followed by a digit list. The subject was asked on each trial to recall both sentence and digits. Half of the sentences had melodic features. Subjects were 40 fourth grade children randomly assigned to Sentence Type groups. There were 25 trials per subject. Results showed (1) melodic cues facilitated processing for Regular Sentences, and (2) these cues were relatively more important for sentences of greater complexity. In a second study, it was hypothesized that selected poor readers would have greater difficulty than normal readers in processing spoken language when melodic features were absent. A modification of the method used in the first study was used. Poor readers had greater difficulty in processing all stimulus types. Serendipitous findings suggest that standardized group-administered reading and intelligence tests are confounded measures. (Author/DB)