Comprehension monitoring in language-disordered children: a preliminary investigation of cognitive and linguistic factors.

ABSTRACT

This study provided a preliminary investigation of the relative influence of cognitive and communicative factors in comprehension monitoring. This question was approached by studying language-disordered (LD) children for whom these abilities are presumably dissociated. Their performance on an ambiguity detection task was compared to that of two groups of control children, one matched for comprehension level and the other for cognitive level. Results revealed that LD children performed similarly to the control children who were matched for level of comprehension. The LD children's performance was examined along a continuum of the relative influence of cognitive and communicative factors, given that neither type of factor alone could sufficiently account for effective comprehension monitoring. It was concluded that communicative factors, both active primary comprehension and social communicative knowledge, had a stronger influence than the cognitive factors in our particular comprehension monitoring task.