Temporal Adverbial Clause Positioning and Dyslexia

Temporal adverbial clauses are present in many forms of writing. These clauses can impact the complexity of a sentence. Sentence complexity can have some effect on how readers with a diagnosed reading disability, such as dyslexia, process language. This study incorporated Hawkins’ (1994) theories about Early Immediate Constituency into a self-paced reading task designed to evaluate whether or not temporal adverbial clause positioning caused the main clause of the sentence to become more difficult to understand. Hawkins theorized that main clauses appearing at the beginning of a sentence would create an environment where a reader could reach sentence comprehension faster (CITE). The experiment used software called Linger to present the self-paced reading task. Eight participants – four with dyslexia and four without – volunteered to read sentence items from a college level textbook that had temporal adverbial clauses appearing before and after the main clause of sentences. Statistical significance in the findings show that participants read sentences more quickly when the temporal adverbial clause appeared before the main clause; however, more research is required to determine the difference between sentences fronted by adverbial clauses and sentences fronted by main clauses.