Skilled and less skilled comprehenders: French children's processing of anaphoric devices in written texts

This experiment investigated the processing of anaphoric devices in French 9‐year‐old skilled and less skilled comprehenders, matched in decoding and vocabulary skills. It was designed to study whether the differences observed between skilled and less skilled comprehenders could be attributed to a specific deficit in processing anaphors or to a more basic deficit. Children were asked to identify the antecedents of different anaphors while reading two long stories. Processing complexity was manipulated by varying three properties of anaphors: type (personal pronoun or general noun), syntactic function (subject or object) and distance in relation to antecedents (near or far). In both texts less skilled comprehenders performed less well than skilled ones. Type and syntactic function affected anaphor resolution: pronouns were more difficult to resolve than general nouns, objects more difficult than subjects. In one text far antecedents were more difficult to find than near antecedents, but the opposite effect was observed in the other text. The interactions between comprehension skill and the three manipulated factors suggest that a specific deficit in the processing of anaphors contributes to the lower performance of less skilled comprehenders, who had particular difficulties with object pronouns. The analysis of incorrect responses confirmed the weight of such specific difficulties. In conclusion, the interdependence between a specific deficit in the processing of anaphors and other deficits is discussed.