An Investigation on the Relationship Between Listening Text Comprehension and Comprehension of Object-Relative Clauses
Donato Lauria, Graziana Difonzo, Maria Porfido, Andrea Marini
Few studies have investigated the role of specific syntactic structures in listening text comprehension. This work aims to contribute to this field by exploring the potential relationship between listening text comprehension abilities and the comprehension of sentences with varying syntactic complexity in typically developing children aged 7-8 years, divided into two groups: one characterized by high-level oral text comprehension and another by medium-low level listening text comprehension. The results reveal that: (1) object relative clauses are more difficult to comprehend than subject relative clauses and active and passive declarative sentences; (2) the ability to comprehend object relative clauses differentiates children with varying levels of listening text comprehension and correlates with the ability to understand syntactically complex paragraphs, characterized by long and articulated periods; (3) such paragraphs are better understood by children with high-level oral comprehension compared to those with medium-low comprehension; (4) the ability to correctly interpret object relative clauses correlates with non-verbal problem-solving abilities but not with measures of phonological short-term and working memory. Overall, these findings support the hypothesis that comprehension of object relative clauses would lead to better listening text comprehension because the sophisticated problem-solving abilities required for their correct interpretation would also enable understanding of long and articulated periods that characterize the more syntactically complex paragraphs of an oral text. From a clinical perspective, the findings from this research suggest investigating the ability to comprehend this type of sentences in 7-8-year-old children with listening text comprehension difficulties.
Keywords
Text comprehension, Child development, Comprehension of relative clauses.
