Syntax and Sentence Structure Flashcards

A CALT is targeting passive sentence comprehension with a student who correctly interprets 'The dog chased the cat' but consistently misinterprets 'The cat was chased by the dog.' Which intervention approach is CONTRAINDICATED because it reinforces a compensatory strategy rather than building true syntactic processing?

Answer: Cueing the student to rely on real-world plausibility to determine who performed the action

Cueing students to rely on semantic plausibility (who could logically do the action) is a compensatory strategy that bypasses syntactic processing entirely. While it may temporarily improve accuracy on plausible sentences, it does not build the syntactic parsing skills needed for non-plausible or ambiguous contexts. Effective CALT intervention targets the syntactic signal itself — the passive construction markers — and uses reversible sentences specifically because they cannot be solved by plausibility alone.

A student reads 'The report that the committee that the director appointed reviewed was flawed' and demonstrates severe comprehension failure. This sentence exemplifies which syntactic phenomenon, and what is the PRIMARY cognitive bottleneck it creates?

Answer: Double center-embedding, which exhausts verbal working memory capacity before the main predicate is reached

This sentence contains a doubly center-embedded relative clause: 'the committee [that the director appointed] reviewed' is embedded within 'the report [that the committee... reviewed] was flawed.' Center-embedded structures are especially taxing because the reader must hold multiple uncompleted subject NPs in verbal working memory before reaching the verbs that resolve each clause. Double embedding overwhelms working memory for most readers. Right-branching structures (e.g., 'the cat that chased the rat that ate the malt') are processed much more easily because each clause completes before the next opens.

A 12-year-old demonstrates average decoding accuracy (SS = 98) but significantly below-average reading comprehension (SS = 72). Written language samples show heavy reliance on simple and compound sentences with a near-complete absence of subordinate clauses, relative clauses, and nominalization. According to the Simple View of Reading, which explanation BEST accounts for this profile?

Answer: A language comprehension deficit, specifically in syntactic knowledge of complex academic structures

The Simple View of Reading (Hoover & Gough) holds that Reading Comprehension = Decoding × Language Comprehension. With average decoding and below-average comprehension, the deficit lies squarely in the language comprehension component. The specific production pattern — absence of complex syntax — provides converging evidence that the locus is syntactic knowledge of academic structures (subordination, nominalization, embedded clauses), not vocabulary alone. Vocabulary deficits would not produce this syntactic production profile, and the SVR framework eliminates decoding as the bottleneck.

Which statement BEST explains why syntactic priming is a theoretically motivated technique in structured literacy sentence-level intervention, rather than a simple imitation or modeling procedure?

Answer: Repeated exposure to a target syntactic structure increases the likelihood of producing that structure by activating and strengthening its representation in implicit memory, independent of lexical content

Syntactic priming (Bock, 1986) is the phenomenon whereby exposure to a syntactic structure increases the probability of producing that same structure — an implicit learning mechanism that operates independently of the specific words used. This is theoretically distinct from imitation (which is explicit and lexically bound) or working memory support (which is a performance scaffold). In intervention, repeated production of a target structure (e.g., passives, relative clauses) leverages this implicit priming to strengthen the underlying syntactic representation, making it more accessible for spontaneous use.

An older student with a documented history of developmental language disorder produces 'I have two foots' and 'There are three deers in the yard.' This morphosyntactic error pattern is MOST accurately distinguished from typical overregularization by which characteristic?

Answer: It reflects persistent default-form production in which the regular rule is applied but irregular allomorphs are not robustly retrieved or suppressed, unlike the self-correcting U-shaped pattern in typical development

Classic overregularization in typical development (the U-shaped curve) is a transient stage: children first produce correct irregulars by rote, then temporarily overregularize when the regular rule is acquired, then correct — the process is self-resolving. In an older student with DLD, persistent default-form production is qualitatively different: the regular rule is clearly productive (evidenced by 'foots,' 'deers'), but the irregular allomorphs are either not stored robustly or not retrieved and selected efficiently over the default. This persists rather than resolving, and targeting irregular morphology in intervention is warranted.

A CALT conducting a sentence elicitation assessment notes that a student consistently omits the complementizer 'that' in object complement clauses, producing 'She believed he was telling the truth' instead of 'She believed that he was telling the truth.' How should this pattern be scored and interpreted?

Answer: As a grammatically acceptable optional deletion — complementizer 'that' is freely omissible in English object complement clauses — and should not be scored as an error

In English, the complementizer 'that' introducing object complement clauses (after verbs like believe, know, think, say) is optionally deletable — 'She believed he was telling the truth' is fully grammatical. This is known as 'that-omission' or complementizer ellipsis and is standard in both spoken and written English. Marking this as an error would be a false positive, potentially leading to unnecessary and clinically incorrect intervention. Advanced syntactic knowledge for a CALT includes distinguishing obligatory syntactic elements from optional ones — a critical skill to avoid over-pathologizing normal variation.