Comprehension of Chinese relative clauses by dyslexic children

This study aims to investigate Chinese dyslexic children's difficulty in comprehending Chinese relative clauses, the structure which receives a lot of attention in previous studies on Chinese sentence processing (Gibbson 1998, 2000; King & Just 1991; Ng 2008). It also intends to examine the relationship between working memory and comprehension of Chinese relative clauses by dyslexic children. In this study, the experimental group consisted of Chinese dyslexic students from the primary schools in Hong Kong, the control group of the IQ and chronological age matched non-dyslexic counterparts. Two test instruments, an IQ test, Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven 1998), and a computerized Chinese sentence comprehension test were conducted with the two groups of participants. The IQ test was used to ensure that the IQ of the dyslexic children was comparable with that of the non-dyslexic students. The computerized Chinese sentence comprehension test required the participants to listen or read Chinese sentences and then identify the picture matching the meaning of each sentence. The results of this study indicate that dyslexic children did significantly worse than their non-dyslexic counterparts, not only in reading comprehension, but also in listening comprehension of Chinese relative clauses. Dyslexic children performed the worst in the listening comprehension test which required delayed responses and demanding working memory. Subject relatives which involve heavier working memory load than object relatives were processed by dyslexic children with greater difficulty. The findings of this study have implications for the training of dyslexic children's working memory in relation to sentence comprehension.