Characteristics of Semantic Processing in Children with Reading Difficulties through Grammaticality Judgment Task

Abstract

Objectives: Previous studies have reported that children with poor reading show deficiencies in their ability to suppress unnecessary information during reading; however, most studies have used homonym tasks to prove this. Accordingly, we tried to look into the semantic processing characteristics of children with poor reading in sentence-level processing to expand the results of precedent studies away from the homonym task paradigm. Methods: 11 children with poor reading and 12 typical children in 3-6 grade participated. They conducted the grammaticality judgment task to judge whether there were any grammatical errors in the presented sentences. At that time, we recorded reaction accuracy and reaction time. The grammaticality judgment task was divided into the semantic-related condition and the semantic-unrelated condition according to the meaning connection intensity of two words in the sentences. Results: In response accuracy, both children with poor reading and typical children performed lower in the semantic-unrelated condition than in the semantic-related condition, but there were no significant differences in the performance of the two groups. In response time, children with poor reading overall took longer to judge grammaticality than typical children, and notably spent more time reacting in the semantic-unrelated condition than the semantic-related condition. Conclusion: Children with poor reading have difficulties suppressing unnecessarily active information compared to typical children. This tendency to allocate cognitive resources to unnecessary information when they read could ultimately be one of the factors that cause them to fail to comprehend reading.