Comprehension of grammar: normal and abnormal development

Thesis

This thesis is in two parts. Part 1 reviews work on comprehension of grammatical structure in children and describes the development of a new Test for the Reception of Grammar (TRCG). TROG assesses understanding of a variety of grammatical contrasts using a format where the child is required to select from an array a picture to correspond to a phrase or sentence spoken by the tester. Results from 280 normal children aged from 3—6 to 13-2 are presented. It is shown that several grammatical structures are not completely mastered by age 13. and in some instances it appears that the accepted rule that comprehension precedes production is contravened. Data on reliability and validity of TROG are also presented.

Part 2 is Concerned with the application of TROG to 73 children with receptive and expressive developmental language disorders. It is shown that the majority of these children perform below age level both on TROG and on a test of receptive vocabulary. Further. there is a strong relationship between performance on TROG and grammatical complexity of expressive speech. Structures involving decoding of .word order appear to give these children particular difficulty, over and above their general comprehension deficits. Results are discussed in relation to psychological theories of developmental language disorders, and implications for the classification of these disorders are considered.

Authors: Bishop, D

• Publication date: 1977
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: Oxford University, UK
• Language: English
• Keywords: child development; grammar; language comprehension
• Subjects: Language comprehension; grammar; child development