The influence of text complexity on the relationship between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension

Theories of reading comprehension highlight the role of syntactic awareness in developing skill in understanding text, with emerging evidence showing it predicts progress. Building on this, we investigate whether syntactic awareness influences reading comprehension differentially for simple versus complex texts, both in terms of initial level and growth rate. The study involved Grade 3 Chinese children (mean age 9.23 at Time 1), followed over three years. Data were collected on Chinese syntactic awareness, Chinese reading comprehension, and other cognitive and language factors at the start. Results show that syntactic awareness predicts the initial level of reading comprehension for both simple and complex reading materials. Critically, syntactic awareness predicts growth in reading comprehension for complex, but not for simple, materials. These findings provide much-needed empirical validation of the theoretical prediction as to the value of awareness of sentence structure in the progress that children make in understanding complex texts.