The Processing of Compound Noun in Children with Poor Reading Comprehension

Objectives: Poor comprehenders lack vocabulary knowledge and have inefficient meaning processing abilities, which negatively affects their reading comprehension. This study investigated if poor comprehenders differ from good comprehenders when processing the meanings of compound nouns. Methods: The participants were 10 poor comprehenders and 10 good comprehenders in 3-5 grade. Accuracy and the response times were measured while children performed a priming lexical decision task. In this task, compound nouns were divided into high and low frequency conditions, and priming words were divided into conditions related to the modifier of the compound noun (modifier condition) and conditions related to the head of the compound noun (head condition). Results: Poor comprehenders showed lower accuracy and longer response times than good comprehenders. Both groups showed lower accuracy and longer response time in the low frequency condition than the high frequency condition. Also, both groups showed shorter response times in the head condition than the modifier condition. However, in case of the poor comprehenders, accuracy was significantly lower under the low frequency modifier condition, and response times were significantly longer under the low frequency condition. Conclusion: Overall, poor comprehenders had difficulty in processing the meaning of compound nouns. This could be a result of weak organization of semantic networks in their mental lexicon. In addition, it could be affected by a lack of understanding of syntactic structures and the semantic relations of compound nouns.