Independence of syntactic and phonological deficits in dyslexia

Abstract

The data are from an experiment addressing the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing, and the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing. <br/> The experiment consisted of presenting a complex Noun Phrase (e.g., the owner of the house) that served as a preamble for participants to make a full sentence (e.g., “the owner of the house is away”). The preamble could be presented either visually or aurally, and the number of the two nouns in the NP was systematically varied to create number matched or mismatched preambles (e.g., the owners of the house, or the owner of the houses). Additionally, the second noun could be either a low or high frequency noun. <br/> The experiment was implemented using EPrime v2. The excel file contains the merged output of EPrime, the transcribed elicited sentences, and the coding of responses in terms of their validity and type of error (the second tab in the excel file contains a coding key).