Towards text simplification for poor readers with intellectual disability: when do connectives enhance text cohesion?
Adding connective words to texts does not help poor readers with ID unless the words are already familiar.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave short texts to adults with intellectual disability.
Some texts had extra connective words like "because" or "so."
The goal was to see if these words helped readers understand more.
What they found
Extra connectives did not boost overall understanding.
Only familiar additive or contrastive words such as "and" or "but" helped a little.
Unfamiliar temporal or causal connectives like "meanwhile" or "therefore" added no benefit.
How this fits with other research
Heslop et al. (2007) showed big gains when adults with ID learned the reciprocal-teaching routine. Their strategy work proves comprehension can improve, yet the 2013 text tweak alone was too weak.
van Wingerden et al. (2017) found that many children with mild ID still read at a first-grade decoding level. Weak decoding may explain why extra connectives were not useful; the words could not be processed fast enough.
Schertz et al. (2018) used texts built with high-frequency words and saw large vocabulary growth. Their success supports the 2013 warning: choose familiar language features, not just more of them.
Why it matters
Do not rewrite material by stuffing in connectives. First check that the reader already knows the target words. If you want to teach a new connective, pre-teach it with pictures or role-play, then re-introduce it in stories. Pair this with decoding or strategy lessons like those in Heslop et al. (2007) for a fuller boost.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Cohesive elements of texts such as connectives (e.g., but, in contrast) are expected to facilitate inferential comprehension in poor readers. Two experiments tested this prediction in poor readers with intellectual disability (ID) by: (a) comparing literal and inferential text comprehension of texts with and without connectives and/or high frequency content words (Experiment 1) and (b) exploring the effects of type and familiarity of connectives on two-clause text comprehension by means of a cloze task (Experiment 2). Neither the addition of high frequency content words nor connectives in general produced inferential comprehension improvements. However, although readers with ID were less likely to select the target connective in the cloze task than chronologically age-matched readers (mean age=21 years) in general, their performance was affected by the type of connective and its familiarity. Familiarity had a facilitative effect for additive and contrastive connectives, but interfered in the case of temporal and causal connectives. The average performance of a reading level-matched control group (typically developing children) was similar to the group of readers with ID although the pattern of interaction between familiarity and type of connectives varied between groups. The implications of these findings for the adaptation of texts in special education contexts are discussed.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.01.006