Principles of binding and control in the grammars of good and poor readers.
Item
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Title
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Principles of binding and control in the grammars of good and poor readers.
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Identifier
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AAI9530926
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identifier
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9530926
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Creator
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Waltzman, Dava Epstein.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Helen Smith Cairns
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Education, Reading | Health Sciences, Speech Pathology | Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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This study investigated the relationship among grammatical knowledge, phonological short-term memory and reading achievement in 63 third grade good (n = 41) and poor (n = 22) readers. The primary intent was to answer questions about differences in grammatical knowledge between the reading groups and to determine whether poor readers have immature grammars as compared to their skilled peers. Underlying grammatical knowledge was assessed through the use of specific constructions associated with Universal Grammar, principles of binding and control. These principles represent modular subsystems of grammar, which can be tapped by a variety of structures and a range of complexity. The subject's interpretation of each grammatical structure was assessed by a sentence-picture matching task in which all of the possible interpretations of verbally presented sentences were depicted. The task required that the subject select the pictorial representation(s) of a sentence that had been presented orally. Each sentence was repeated as often as required by the subject in order to reduce processing demands on working memory. Decoding skill as a measure of reading ability was also assessed, as was each subject's ability to encode phonological information in short-term working memory. Tasks requiring obedience to oral directions and sentence recall were employed as the memory measures. Differences in the overall grammatical knowledge between the two reading groups were completely accounted for by differential performance on Principle B. This finding is of interest, as it has been suggested in the literature that obedience to Principle B results from a combination of grammatical and pragmatic principles. If performance on Principle B is attributable to the pragmatic Principle P (Wexler & Chein, 1985), then this study suggests another way good readers may differ from poor readers, in addition to syntactic ability or phonological short-term memory. Correlations revealed that the relationship between grammar and short term memory was greater than either was to decoding skill.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
