Comparison of listening and reading comprehension Listening comprehension depends on children’s ability to make use of morphology and grammar to extract meaning from sentences, and also requires that they understand the vocabulary in those sentences. It was assessed using the Sentence Structure subtest from CELF- 3UK (Semel et al., 2000). For each of 20 items, the examiner reads a short sentence and the child must point to the picture that illustrates it, choosing from an array of four alternatives. All items were administered.
Reading comprehension was assessed using a parallel version of the listening comprehension test, consisting of 20 printed sentences each written to correspond to one of the alternative response pictures in the arrays offered for the listening version. Offering different sentences to assess listening and reading comprehension avoided potential practice effects. In most cases, the printed sentences involved a semantic change to the spoken item. For example, one practice item for the listening comprehension test was: The boy has a ball. The reading comprehension version was: The girl has a ball. The same sentence structures were tested in both versions, if not always in the corresponding items. For example, item 1 in the listening version was: The boy is not climbing. The corresponding printed item was: The boy is climbing the frame. However, for balance, a printed sentence included a negative elsewhere in the test. Each sentence was printed on a card and children read it aloud. The sentence remained in view while a response picture was selected. Half the children completed the listening comprehension task first followed by reading comprehension and the others completed the tasks in the opposite order. No feedback was offered.