Comparing the Comprehension of Complex Relative Clauses in Dyslexic and Normal Persian Children

In the past thirty years, processing relative clauses in different languages has had an important role in linguistic and psycholinguistic researches. A common theme in experimental studies has been the comparison of performance on subject and object relative clauses. Moreover, the comparison of verbal abilities in normal and dyslexic children is one of the most important issues in the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics. Evidence shows that dyslexic children not only have poor phonological processing, but also show compromised performance in complex syntactic processing tests as compared with normal children. This study investigated and compared the comprehension of subject-subject (S-S) and subject-object (S-O) relative clauses in children with dyslexia and normal children. The Present study tested the predictions of three hypotheses and one theory including dependence locality theory, structural hypothesis, linear hypothesis and word order difference hypothesis. This study had a cross sectional, descriptive and comparative design. The study population consisted of third to fifth grade elementary students in Kerman in 2017-2018 academic year. Participants were 60 monolingual Persian-speaking students (mean age of 10.5 years): 30 with developmental dyslexia and 30 normal children. Dyslexic children were selected by availability sampling and normal children were selected by table of random numbers. These students were evaluated by vocabulary pre-test and grammar pre-test. Two pre-tests measured comprehension of words and transitive verbs. In order to evaluate comprehending of two types of relative clauses, a picture-matching test with four alternatives was designed. One of the alternatives was the correct response and the other three contained main clause error (MCE), relative clause error (RCE), and double clause error (DCE)...