The comprehension of double negation in Chinese children with reading difficulties

This study investigated the processing of double negation in Chinese children with reading difficulties. The comprehension of Mandarin affirmative, single negative and double negative sentences was tested with Chinese young poor readers and typical readers, using a sentence-picture verification task. Results showed that double negative sentences were most difficult to process for both groups; the poor readers performed significantly worse than the typical readers in comprehending double negative sentences, while no difference between the two groups was observed in comprehending affirmative and single negative sentences. Besides, morphological awareness correlated with the comprehension of double negative and single negative sentences in poor readers, while this correlation did not emerge with typical readers. Overall, our results suggest that children with reading difficulties experienced great processing difficulty in double negation, confirming that reading disorders are also characterised by oral language difficulties, in particular in the comprehension of sentences requiring high processing costs.