Attention Factors Mediating Syntactic Deficiency in Reading-Disabled Children.

Compared effects of syntactic context and attention on identifying masked spoken words in reading-disabled seventh graders and good readers. Found that, in both groups, syntactic structure of context triggers a process of anticipation for particular syntactic categories based on an assumption that linguistic messages are syntactically coherent; reading-disabled are less aware of the process and thus less affected. (KDFB)