Using a word order correction paradigm, we assessed syntactic awareness skills in childrenwith good and poor reading comprehension, matched for age, decoding skill, and nonverbalability. Poor comprehenders performed less well than normal readers, and the performance ofboth groups was influenced by the syntactic complexity and semantic ambiguity of the sentences.These findings support the view that poor comprehenders have language processing difficultiesencompassing grammatical as well as semantic weaknesses, although their phonologicalprocessing skills are normal. The implications of such language weaknesses for the developmentof skilled reading are discussed.