The Role of Syntax in Reading Comprehension: a study of Bilingual Readers

2.1 Main research questions 
 
Given that a role for syntax has been established in the acquisition of reading by monolingual 
children, we now want to extend this question to the bilingual population. Thus, the most general 
objective of this study is to discern the role that syntactic development (as opposed to phonology and 
vocabulary) plays in the acquisition of reading comprehension and its precursor skill, listening 
comprehension, in bilingual children. We focus explicitly on specific syntactic structures known to be 
milestones in the development of monolingual children, namely coordination and subordination. Our 
main question is whether bilingual children with a strong knowledge base in their first language, 
Spanish, acquire reading comprehension in English better than children with weaker Spanish syntax.
The hypothesized relationship between a strong knowledge base in the first language and the 
development of reading skills in a second language has been proposed by many researchers on 
bilingualism, notably J. Cummins, (see Cummins, 1976, 1979, 1981), but it has not been investigated 
in a controlled experimental setting. This relationship is described in Cummins’ threshold hypothesis 
and remains controversial today. A much more widely accepted idea is that a strong base in the 
second language (L2) serves the child well in developing reading skills in that same language. This 
constitutes our second question, namely to what degree does a strong syntactic base in the L2 (English) 
contribute to listening comprehension in the L2, and is this a more significant factor than the 
corresponding base in the L1 (Spanish). We are thus interested in the relative contribution that each of 
the bilingual child’s languages makes to reading in the L2. Furthermore, we want to investigate the 
development of syntax in the bilingual child. Specifically, we want to know whether the syntactic 
systems in the bilingual child follow the same developmental patterns as that in the monolingual child.
Finally, we want to know whether there is parallel development in the syntactic systems of the L1 and 
the L2. 
The particular measures of syntax we chose are based on research in first language development:
coordination with “and” and two types of subordination, relative clauses with the head in object 
position and the gap in subject position (OS relative clauses) and temporal adverbial clauses with 
“before”. In the following section we motivate our choice of complex sentence types with a brief 
review of findings on monolingual L1 development and adult L2 development.