Pronoun Resolution in Discourse by Chinese Dyslexic Children: A Preliminary Study on Text Integration

Previous psycholinguistic studies on dyslexia mainly emphasize on phonological, lexical, morphological and syntactic levels of language, and the majority of studies works on English language. This study attempts to extend the current trend of investigation to higher-order text integration with coreference in Chinese language by Chinese dyslexic children who suffered from problems with cognitive and language processing abilities. A computerized self-paced reading experiment was conducted with dyslexic and non-dyslexic children who read short discourses containing apronoun and designed according to three types of discourse situation which were referential interference, protagonist continuity and topic prominence. The results indicate that dyslexic children generally performed worse than non-dyslexic counterparts who had comparable age, education level and intelligent quotient level in pronoun resolution, especially when there was an intervening referent. And dyslexic children could not benefit from topic prominence for referents’ accessibility in terms of resolution time.However, further detailed analyses would reveal that the dyslexics did not differ that much from their non-dyslexic counterparts. And the study also showswhich conditions may be harder for pronoun interpretation for children. The findings provide a preliminary foundation to the research community and to the practitioners working with dyslexic children for a better understanding of dyslexic children’s performance in text integration involving coreference. Together with previous findings in literature, a more comprehensive description of dyslexics’ language performance may be available for remedial or pedagogical purposes.