Syntaktisk komplexitet hos ungdomar och vuxna med läs- och skrivsvårigheter
Author
Summary, in English
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if there are any differences regarding syntactic complexity in written language between persons with (phonologically based) reading and writing difficulties and a control group. Earlier research has pointed to such a difference, indicating that texts written by subjects with reading and writing difficulties display a lower grade of syntactic complexity than text written by control groups.
Two texts each from 48 subjects (24 from each category) were collected. The subjects were divided in two age groups, one consisting of 15-year-olds and the other of university students (adults in various ages). The subjects were selected through a word decoding test and a spelling test, where the lowest performing formed the group of reading and writing difficulties and the highest performing formed the control groups. All subjects had Swedish as their mother tongue.
The syntactic aspects studied were number of words per syntactic sentence (Sw. "syntaktisk mening", cf. T-unit), frequency of subordinate clauses, number of words per initial clause, the "fundament" (in Scandinavian linguistics a term for the position in front of the main clause finite verb ? Swedish is a V2-language) and type of "fundament", i.e. phrase or sentence type.
The result does not render support to the assumption of lower syntactic complexity among subjects with reading and writing difficulties. A small difference between the groups may be discerned concerning number of words per syntactic sentence; in both age groups the syntactic meanings were longer in the texts of the control group. This difference was, however, very small and was not enough to confirm the assumption of lower syntactic complexity among youths and adults with reading and writing difficulties. On the contrary the result showed a noticeable similarity between the groups.
Two texts each from 48 subjects (24 from each category) were collected. The subjects were divided in two age groups, one consisting of 15-year-olds and the other of university students (adults in various ages). The subjects were selected through a word decoding test and a spelling test, where the lowest performing formed the group of reading and writing difficulties and the highest performing formed the control groups. All subjects had Swedish as their mother tongue.
The syntactic aspects studied were number of words per syntactic sentence (Sw. "syntaktisk mening", cf. T-unit), frequency of subordinate clauses, number of words per initial clause, the "fundament" (in Scandinavian linguistics a term for the position in front of the main clause finite verb ? Swedish is a V2-language) and type of "fundament", i.e. phrase or sentence type.
The result does not render support to the assumption of lower syntactic complexity among subjects with reading and writing difficulties. A small difference between the groups may be discerned concerning number of words per syntactic sentence; in both age groups the syntactic meanings were longer in the texts of the control group. This difference was, however, very small and was not enough to confirm the assumption of lower syntactic complexity among youths and adults with reading and writing difficulties. On the contrary the result showed a noticeable similarity between the groups.
Publishing year
2007
Language
Swedish
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Document type
Student publication for Bachelor's degree
Topic
- Languages and Literatures
Keywords
- Läs- och skrivsvårigheter
- Dyslexi
- Grammatik
- Syntax
- Ungdomar
- Vuxna
- Humanities
- Humaniora
- Grammar, semantics, semiotics, syntax
- Grammatik, semantik, semiotik, syntax
Supervisor
- Gunlög Josefsson