초등 2-3학년 어휘발달지연 아동의 구문이해 및 구문인식능력

Abstract

Syntax is a rule that governs the structure of a sentence. This syntactic ability can be evaluated with syntactic knowledge and syntactic awareness. There are several factors could be related to syntactic abilities and vocabulary would be the one factors which affects the syntactic abilities. Children with vocabulary delay have weaker vocabulary knowledge than typically developing children. The purpose of this study is to examine syntactic abilites for children with vocabulary delay who are 2nd graders to 3rd graders. They were administered sentence comprehension to measure syntactic knowledge and word-order correction to measure syntactic awareness. Two tasks measured accuracy and reaction time.

The followings are research questions: 1) Is there a significant difference in the accuracy of sentence comprehension and syntactic awareness between children with vocabulary delay and typically developing children?

2) Is there a difference in the accuracy of sentence comprehension and syntactic awareness within each group?

3) Is there a significant difference in the response time of sentence comprehension and syntactic awareness between the two groups?

4) Is there a significant difference between the two groups in working memory ability that would affect those syntactic tasks?

Total 21 students in grades 2-3 participated in this study. There were 11 children with vocabulary delay, and 10 typically developing children. All children should have nonverbal intelligence score of 80 or above in K-CTONI-2. Typically developing children should obtain higher than -1 of standard deviation on Receptive & Expressive Vocabulary Test (REVT). Children with vocabulary delay should obtain lower than 10%ile on REVT. As well, all children have no history of visual, hearing, neurological and emotional problem. In this study, Language Scale for School-aged Children (LSSC) 'Sentence Comprehension' was used as a syntactic comprehension task. As a syntactic awareness task, word-order correction tasks was used. Both accuracy and reaction time were measured in the sentence comprehension and syntactic awareness task. The phonological working memory was measured using the Korean Language-based Reading Assessment (KOLRA).

The following is the result and discussion of this study. First, there was no significant difference on accuracy of sentence comprehension between children with vocabulary delay and typically developing children while there was a statistically significant difference on accuracy of syntactic awareness task between two groups. Second, it was found that there were significant differences in accuracy between the two syntactic tasks within each group. Third, there were no significant differences on reaction times of two syntactic tasks between two groups.

Fourth, it was found that children with vocabulary delay had significantly lower working memory ability than typically developing children. The results showed that children with vocabulary delay did not differ from those who are typically developing children on sentence compreheion tasks. However, they did perform significantly lower than typically developing children on syntactic awareness tasks. This finding suggests that in order to evaluate language deficits of school-aged children with vocabulary should include syntactic awareness tasks as well as syntactic knowledge tasks.