Syntactic Awareness in Preadolescents: Methodological Issues

Intentional syntactic analyses were elicited from native French speakers in grade 6 (N = 83) via seven tasks. Orally presented sentences, 50% containing errors of morphology or word order, were (1) repeated & (2) judged correct or incorrect; the incorrect sentences were subsequently repeated for subjects (Ss) to (3) locate the error & (4) correct the sentence. The same incorrect sentences, functioning as models, were coupled with correct target sentences in oral & written modalities for three replication tasks in which Ss had to produce the target sentence with the error found in the model sentence. Target words to be modified were (5) in the same place as the error in the model, (6) in a different place in the sentence, or (7) in the same place but lexically distinct. Results show that the replication task paradigm (5-7) behaves differently from traditional tests of syntactic awareness (1-4) & that (7) in particular, the most difficult replication task, promises to be a clearer index of the ability to reflect on syntax than traditional tests. 4 Tables, 1 Figure, 50 References. Adapted from the source document