The Effects of Syntactic Maturity on Comprehension of Graded Reading Passages

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of syntactic complexity on comprehension. It was expected that reading passages with the same readability, as measured by widely accepted readability formulas, but with differences to syntactic complexity, as measured by "sentence weights," would result in variable comprehension scores. A second area of interest was the performance of students reading at independent, instructional, and frustration levels. Each of sixty-five seventh grade subjects took a short practice cloze test, read a baseline passage to establish reading levels, and two of four test passages at a seventh grade readability level but with different syntactic weights (2.10 to 2.70). Data from the cloze tests were analyzed using a three by four analysis of variance (SPSS ANOVA program). Results indicated a highly significant main effect for both reading level (group) and sentence weights (test). In addition there was a significant interaction between test and group.