ABSTRACT
The metalinguistic immaturity hypothesis gains support from the considerable body of research relating metalinguistic development to reading ability, and from studies finding that, even with verbal ability effects controlled, good readers perform better than poor readers on tests of syntactic awareness. The linguistic immaturity hypothesis and the metalinguistic variant both predict that syntactic delay would be associated with deficiencies in both decoding and comprehension skills. According to the linguistic immaturity hypothesis, poor readers should show delays in all aspects of syntactic processing relative to good readers. The difference model predicts that both the syntactic recall advantage and syntactic awareness would be directly related to the relative balance between comprehension and decoding skills. Readers showing a relative comprehension deficit obtained the same syntactic recall advantage and syntactic awareness scores as controls equated for both decoding skill and vocabulary age.
