Keren Siegel

PI: Prof. Lilach Shalev-Mevorach
Constantiner School of Education, Department of Special
Education & School Counseling

Attention and syntax impairments among young children with reading difficulties

My MA thesis focuses on the role of control of attention in complex syntactic decoding of young struggling readers, a topic which is highly relevant to the educational daily work. In this study the relationship between attention difficulties and syntax difficulties were investigated among young children with reading difficulties. Syntactic complexity can be demonstrated in the following example: the sentence "the girl drew the grandmother" is a simple sentence, but when the words’ order is changed the sentence becomes a complex sentence: This is the grandmother that the girl drew. The latter is an object affinity that among other things requires attention resources in order to understand. 

The study’s sample included 80 2nd and 3rd graders from various schools. All the participants were selected by their teachers based on their reading difficulties and on a gap between their reading performances and their peers’. All participants underwent a battery of tests that included verbal, phonological, attentional, memory and syntax tests. 

A preliminary analysis of the data revealed that many students presented atypical syntax skills. Similarly, deficient attention control was observed in a large number of participants. 

These preliminary findings point to the importance of syntax and attention competencies in the context of reading difficulties. Moreover, identifying the source(s) of reading difficulties will improve our ability to teach reading effectively with struggling readers.