Syntactic Judgment Ability in Children with Learning Disability and Typically Developing Children

Abstract

Children with learning disability often experience difficulty on metalinguistic tasks. Of the different metalinguistic skills, they confront more difficulties on syntactic judgment tasks. Poor performance on the syntactic judgment task is attributed to deficit in working of the memory and lack of grammatical knowledge. The present study was carried out with the aim of studying the syntactic judgment ability in children with learning disability by comparing their performance with typically developing children. Ten children with learning disability and 30 neurotypical children were recruited for the study. The mean age of the participants was around 12.3 years. Syntactic judgment task was administered on these participants. Sentences with semantic anomalies and neutral sentences formed set 1 while sentences with structural or grammatical anomaly were designated as set 2. The results revealed that typically developing children performed well on both set 1 and set 2 where as children with learning disability encountered more difficulty (measured in terms of reaction time and accuracy) on judging sentences with structural anomaly.