Development of word order and morphosyntactic skills in reading comprehension among Chinese elementary school children

• Syntactic skill is a significant component skill in reading comprehension in Chinese.
• Word order skill consistently predicts passage comprehension from grades 1 to 6.
• Morphosyntactic skill is a longitudinal correlate of sentence comprehension.
• Reading sentences and passages differentially rely on morphosyntactic and word order skill.

The present paper reported two studies which compared the roles of word order and morphosyntactic skills in reading comprehension among Chinese elementary school children. In Study 1, we found that over and above the effects of age, nonverbal intelligence and word reading, word order skill was a stable predictor of reading performance throughout grades 1 to 6, whereas morphosyntactic skill was associated with reading comprehension at grades 3 and 4. Study 2 was a three-year longitudinal study which showed that morphosyntactic but not word order skill at grade 2 longitudinally predicted sentence comprehension at grade 3 beyond the control variables and the auto-regressor; word order rather than morphosyntactic skill at grade 2 contributed significant variances to passage comprehension at grades 3 and 4. The findings suggested a differential dependence of reading on word order and morphosyntactic skills at different ages and in reading comprehension at different levels.