Syntactic comprehension – the ability to establish sentence meaning from syntactic signals - has been shown to be a strong correlate of reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades (4-6) in recent studies, but little is known about the conditions for the correlations. On the one hand, syntactic comprehension may be irrelevant if vocabulary is limited. On the other hand, syntactic comprehension may plateau early in the language development process, and thus only be a factor of practical consequence to text comprehension at relatively low levels of language proficiency.
In the present study, we asked whether the correlation changes as a function of language status (majority language as additional language or not), text comprehension level, and/or vocabulary level?
Method: Four-hundred and eight Danish Grade 4 students completed tests of syntactic comprehension, vocabulary, decoding, and text comprehension. 17 percent of the students reported speaking an additional language to Danish at home (DAL).
Results: In preliminary analyses, syntactic comprehension was correlated with text comprehension both across and within language groups. Sentence comprehension and vocabulary were both uniquely predictive of text comprehension in the total and L1 sample, but only vocabulary was a clear unique predictor in the DAL sample. We will report additional analyses of whether vocabulary interacts with syntactic comprehension in predicting text comprehension.
Conclusion: The effect of syntactic comprehension on text comprehension is present both L1 and L2 speakers, but poor vocabulary may overshadow the effect among DAL speakers.