Reading comprehension involves two primary processes: (a) decoding printed text and (b) understan... more Reading comprehension involves two primary processes: (a) decoding printed text and (b) understanding language accessed through the process of decoding. In the early years of reading development, children's ability to comprehend text is largely constrained by individual differences in decoding printed text; however, once decoding becomes automatized, reading comprehension is largely dependent upon one's skills in language comprehension (Catts, Hogan, & Adlof, 2005). In recent decades, numerous studies have investigated how children develop decoding skills and how, when these skills do not develop normally, educators can effectively intervene (e.g.,
The simple view of reading describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listeni... more The simple view of reading describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listening comprehension and the relative contribution of each to reading comprehension across development. We present a cross-sectional analysis of first, second, and third graders (N = 123-125 in each grade) to assess the adequacy of the basic model. Participants completed multiple measures to inform latent constructs of word reading accuracy, word reading fluency, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. In line with previous research, structural equation models confirmed that the influence of decoding skill decreased with increasing grade and that the influence of listening comprehension increased. However, several additional findings indicate that reading development is not that simple and support an elaboration of the basic model: A strong influence of listening comprehension on reading comprehension was apparent by grade 2, decoding skill was best measured by word and nonword reading accuracy in the early grades and word reading fluency in grade 3, and vocabulary skills indirectly affected reading comprehension through both decoding skill and listening comprehension. This new elaborated model, which provides a more comprehensive view of critical influences on reading in the early grades, has diagnostic and instructional ramifications for improving reading pedagogy. Reading comprehension is determined by a wide range of component skills and processes
ng) comprehension dif#culties appear to stem from the discourse level of processing. These childr... more ng) comprehension dif#culties appear to stem from the discourse level of processing. These children are #uent accurate readers who do not demonstrate any signi#cant phonological (Stothard & Hulme, 1995) or syntactic dif#culties (Yuill & Oakhill, 1991; but see Stothard & Hulme, 1992). However, such children do experience dif#culty in answering questions about texts that they have just read (Yuill & Oakhill, 1991). Skilled and less skilled comprehenders differ on a wide range of higher level readingrelated skills (see Yuill & Oakhill, 1991, for a review). The purpose of the current study was to investigate precisely how one of these proposed higher level sources of comprehension failure, meta-cognitive aspects of reading, was related to comprehension ability. Previous work has examined the meta-cognitive knowledge of children with poor word reading skills and has not explored how such knowledge might speci#cally be related to * Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr Kate Cain,
The development of both word reading and text comprehension are outlined. In the section on the d... more The development of both word reading and text comprehension are outlined. In the section on the development of word reading, we discuss the different ways in which words can be read, how reading strategies change with development, and how these ideas have been captured in models of reading development. In the section on comprehension skills, we outline the development of important component processes in comprehension: inference making, metacognitive skills, and understanding of how texts are structured. Finally, we discuss possible sources of comprehension difficulties in children.
Successful reading involves the acquisition of two broad sets of skills and knowledge: those that... more Successful reading involves the acquisition of two broad sets of skills and knowledge: those that enable accurate and efficient word recognition and those that support comprehension. In this article, I focus on the skills and knowledge that support the latter. I consider how research on the development of reading comprehension and on children with specific reading comprehension difficulties can inform the teaching of reading and interventions for struggling readers. Reading is a complex activity. Huey (1968) stated: "To completely analyse what we do when we read would almost be the acme of the psychologist's achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind." The challenge to understand how children learn to read and comprehend text may be great, but the potential benefits for young and struggling readers are far greater. Learning to read is not an end in itself. It is a skill that opens doors and provides opportunities throughout one's lifetime. Successful comprehension of written text enables the reader to acquire and apply new knowledge, to experience other (fictional) worlds, to communicate successfully, and to attain academic success.
In this chapter we consider the nature and the source of difficulties experienced by children wit... more In this chapter we consider the nature and the source of difficulties experienced by children with a specific type of comprehension deficit, children who have developed age-appropriate word reading skills but whose reading comprehension skills lag behind. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, text comprehension is a complex task that involves many different cognitive skills and processes. Consequently, there are many different aspects of the reading process where difficulties may arise, which may, in turn, contribute to these children's poor comprehension. In this chapter, we examine the evidence that impairments at the word-, sentence-, and discourse-level playa causal role in this population's comprehension difficulties. In addition, we consider whether deficits in cognitive abilities such as memory skills and general intelligence, and factors such as amount of exposure to print, contribute to poor comprehension. I In this context, we use the term decoding to refer to word recognition in general, which may be accomplished, for example, by recoding from graphemes to phonemes, by sight recognition, or by analogy (e.g. Ehri, 1999).
The reading-level (or reading-age) match design has become a widely-used tool for investigating t... more The reading-level (or reading-age) match design has become a widely-used tool for investigating the possible direction of the relation between particular skills and word reading ability: Cause or consequence. This paper outlines an analogous method for identifying candidate causes of reading comprehension failure, the `comprehension-age match design' and discusses the strengths and limitations of this design.
Young children's reading comprehension skill is associated with their ability to draw infere... more Young children's reading comprehension skill is associated with their ability to draw inferences (Oakhill 1982, 1984). An experiment was conducted to investigate the direction of this relation and to explore possible sources of inferential failure. Three groups of children participated: Same-age skilled and less skilled comprehenders, and a comprehension-age match group. The pattern of performance indicated that the ability to make inferences was not a by-product of good reading comprehension, rather that good inference skills are a plausible cause of good reading comprehension ability. Failure to make inferences could not be attributed to lack of relevant general knowledge. Instead, the pattern of errors indicated that differences in reading strategy were the most likely source of these group differences.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 1998
Elliptical verb phrases must be interpreted indirectly, using a representation of the surface for... more Elliptical verb phrases must be interpreted indirectly, using a representation of the surface form of nearby (usually preceding) text. We used this fact to demonstrate the different availability of superficial representations of the two clauses in main-subordinate pairs. The acceptability of a later ellipsis was reduced when it took its meaning from a main clause that was followed by a subordinate clause, as compared with other combinations. In addition, positive acceptability judgements were made more quickly (1) when the antecedent clause was subordinate, rather than main, suggesting that the superficial form of a subordinate clause is more important, and (2) when the antecedent was in the immediately preceding clause, rather than two clauses back. These results support the idea that the surface form of subordinate clauses is selectively retained until the corresponding main clause has been read, but the surface form of a main clause is not retained after it has been interpreted.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 1996
Four experiments were carried out to investigate how general knowledge about the stereotypical ge... more Four experiments were carried out to investigate how general knowledge about the stereotypical gender of participants in a text influences comprehension. A self-paced reading task was used to present short texts comprising one, two, or three sentences. The first sentence of each text introduced a stereotypically masculine or feminine participant (e.g. doctor, nurse), or a neutral one. The last sentence introduced a pronoun (he/she) that could match or mismatch the gender of the referent. The first experiment, which was carried out in English, showed that reading times for the last sentence were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the pronoun in the last sentence and the stereotypical gender of the referent in the first sentence. In contrast to English, the gender of the participant can be disambiguated by a preceding article ( el/la) in Spanish. The results of the second, third, and fourth experiments, which were carried out in Spanish, showed that reading times for the first sentences were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the article and the stereotypical gender of the participant. However, reading times for the last sentences did not differ. Overall, the results suggest that information about the stereotypical gender of the participants in a text is incorporated into the representation as soon as it becomes available, and that it affects the ease with which the text is understood.
In this study we investigated the relation between young children's comprehension skill and infer... more In this study we investigated the relation between young children's comprehension skill and inferencemaking ability using a procedure that controlled individual differences in general knowledge (Barnes & Dennis, 1998; Barnes, Dennis, & Haefele-Kalvaitis,1996). A multiepisode story was read to the children, and their ability to make two types of inference was assessed: coherence inferences, which were essential for adequate comprehension of the text, and elaborative inferences, which enhanced the text representation but which were not crucial to understanding. There was a strong relation between comprehension skill and inference-making ability even when knowledge was equally available to all participants. Subsidiary analyses of the source of inference failures revealed different underlying sources of difficulty for good and poor comprehenders.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2008
Purpose The aim was to identify the source of idiom understanding difficulties in children with s... more Purpose The aim was to identify the source of idiom understanding difficulties in children with specific reading comprehension failure. Method Two groups ( n s = 15) of 9- to 10-year-olds participated. One group had age-appropriate word reading and reading comprehension; the other group had age-appropriate word reading but poor reading comprehension. Each child completed an independent assessment of semantic analysis skills and 2 multiple-choice assessments of idiom comprehension. In 1 assessment, idiomatic phrases were embedded in supportive story contexts; in the other assessment, they were presented out of context. Performance on transparent idioms (which are amenable to interpretation by semantic analysis) and opaque idioms (which can only be interpreted by inference from context if the meaning is not known) was compared. Results The groups demonstrated comparable semantic analysis skills and understanding of transparent idioms. Children with poor comprehension were impaired in ...
... Indeed, it is currently estimated that at least half of the world's children ...... more ... Indeed, it is currently estimated that at least half of the world's children ... between concurrentmeasures of morphological awareness and multiple outcome measures by using ... English and French lexical orthographic processing, after substantive controls, but no such correlations ...
... comprehension. They end with their recommendations for future initiatives in readingcomprehen... more ... comprehension. They end with their recommendations for future initiatives in readingcomprehension assessment. ... Comprehension'. The assessment of comprehension in pre-readers and young developing readers presents a challenge. Paul ...
Poor comprehenders have intact word-reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding w... more Poor comprehenders have intact word-reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding what they read. We investigated whether two metalinguistic skills, morphological and syntactic awareness, are specifically related to poor reading comprehension by including separate and combined measures of each. We identified poor comprehenders ( n = 15) and average comprehenders ( n = 15) in Grade 4 who were matched on word-reading accuracy and speed, vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability, and age. The two groups performed comparably on a morphological awareness task that involved both morphological and syntactic cues. However, poor comprehenders performed less well than average comprehenders on a derivational word analogy task in which there was no additional syntactic information, thus tapping only morphological awareness, and also less well on a syntactic awareness task, in which there were no morphological manipulations. Our task and participant-selection process ruled out key no...
Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and infer... more Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared to adults (Experiment One) and 11-to 12-year-olds (Experiment Two). The results broadly support the Global Elaboration Model of figurative competence (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995) with a notable exception: even the youngest children were able to use semantic analysis to derive the meanings of transparent idioms, as well as being sensitive to meaning in context. The findings show that young children process language at both the small-grained phrasal-level as well as the discourse-level to establish figurative meaning and demonstrate that the language processing skills that aid idiom comprehension, as well as idiom knowledge itself, are still not fully developed in 11-to 12-year-olds.
Two studies investigating young readers' use of conjunctions are reported. In Study One, 145 ... more Two studies investigating young readers' use of conjunctions are reported. In Study One, 145 eight- to ten-year-olds completed one of two narrative cloze tasks in which different types of conjunction were deleted. Performance for additive conjunctions was not affected by age in this study, but older children were more likely to select the target conjunction than were younger children for temporal, causal, and adversative terms. Performance was superior in the cloze task in which they were given a restricted choice of responses (three vs. seven). In Study Two, 35 eight- and nine-year-old good and poor comprehenders completed the three-choice cloze task. The poor comprehenders were less likely to select the target terms in general. Sentence-level comprehension skills did not account for their poor performance. The results indicate that understanding of the semantic relations expressed by conjunctions is still developing long after these terms are used correctly in children's s...
Reading comprehension involves two primary processes: (a) decoding printed text and (b) understan... more Reading comprehension involves two primary processes: (a) decoding printed text and (b) understanding language accessed through the process of decoding. In the early years of reading development, children's ability to comprehend text is largely constrained by individual differences in decoding printed text; however, once decoding becomes automatized, reading comprehension is largely dependent upon one's skills in language comprehension (Catts, Hogan, & Adlof, 2005). In recent decades, numerous studies have investigated how children develop decoding skills and how, when these skills do not develop normally, educators can effectively intervene (e.g.,
The simple view of reading describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listeni... more The simple view of reading describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listening comprehension and the relative contribution of each to reading comprehension across development. We present a cross-sectional analysis of first, second, and third graders (N = 123-125 in each grade) to assess the adequacy of the basic model. Participants completed multiple measures to inform latent constructs of word reading accuracy, word reading fluency, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. In line with previous research, structural equation models confirmed that the influence of decoding skill decreased with increasing grade and that the influence of listening comprehension increased. However, several additional findings indicate that reading development is not that simple and support an elaboration of the basic model: A strong influence of listening comprehension on reading comprehension was apparent by grade 2, decoding skill was best measured by word and nonword reading accuracy in the early grades and word reading fluency in grade 3, and vocabulary skills indirectly affected reading comprehension through both decoding skill and listening comprehension. This new elaborated model, which provides a more comprehensive view of critical influences on reading in the early grades, has diagnostic and instructional ramifications for improving reading pedagogy. Reading comprehension is determined by a wide range of component skills and processes
ng) comprehension dif#culties appear to stem from the discourse level of processing. These childr... more ng) comprehension dif#culties appear to stem from the discourse level of processing. These children are #uent accurate readers who do not demonstrate any signi#cant phonological (Stothard & Hulme, 1995) or syntactic dif#culties (Yuill & Oakhill, 1991; but see Stothard & Hulme, 1992). However, such children do experience dif#culty in answering questions about texts that they have just read (Yuill & Oakhill, 1991). Skilled and less skilled comprehenders differ on a wide range of higher level readingrelated skills (see Yuill & Oakhill, 1991, for a review). The purpose of the current study was to investigate precisely how one of these proposed higher level sources of comprehension failure, meta-cognitive aspects of reading, was related to comprehension ability. Previous work has examined the meta-cognitive knowledge of children with poor word reading skills and has not explored how such knowledge might speci#cally be related to * Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr Kate Cain,
The development of both word reading and text comprehension are outlined. In the section on the d... more The development of both word reading and text comprehension are outlined. In the section on the development of word reading, we discuss the different ways in which words can be read, how reading strategies change with development, and how these ideas have been captured in models of reading development. In the section on comprehension skills, we outline the development of important component processes in comprehension: inference making, metacognitive skills, and understanding of how texts are structured. Finally, we discuss possible sources of comprehension difficulties in children.
Successful reading involves the acquisition of two broad sets of skills and knowledge: those that... more Successful reading involves the acquisition of two broad sets of skills and knowledge: those that enable accurate and efficient word recognition and those that support comprehension. In this article, I focus on the skills and knowledge that support the latter. I consider how research on the development of reading comprehension and on children with specific reading comprehension difficulties can inform the teaching of reading and interventions for struggling readers. Reading is a complex activity. Huey (1968) stated: "To completely analyse what we do when we read would almost be the acme of the psychologist's achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind." The challenge to understand how children learn to read and comprehend text may be great, but the potential benefits for young and struggling readers are far greater. Learning to read is not an end in itself. It is a skill that opens doors and provides opportunities throughout one's lifetime. Successful comprehension of written text enables the reader to acquire and apply new knowledge, to experience other (fictional) worlds, to communicate successfully, and to attain academic success.
In this chapter we consider the nature and the source of difficulties experienced by children wit... more In this chapter we consider the nature and the source of difficulties experienced by children with a specific type of comprehension deficit, children who have developed age-appropriate word reading skills but whose reading comprehension skills lag behind. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, text comprehension is a complex task that involves many different cognitive skills and processes. Consequently, there are many different aspects of the reading process where difficulties may arise, which may, in turn, contribute to these children's poor comprehension. In this chapter, we examine the evidence that impairments at the word-, sentence-, and discourse-level playa causal role in this population's comprehension difficulties. In addition, we consider whether deficits in cognitive abilities such as memory skills and general intelligence, and factors such as amount of exposure to print, contribute to poor comprehension. I In this context, we use the term decoding to refer to word recognition in general, which may be accomplished, for example, by recoding from graphemes to phonemes, by sight recognition, or by analogy (e.g. Ehri, 1999).
The reading-level (or reading-age) match design has become a widely-used tool for investigating t... more The reading-level (or reading-age) match design has become a widely-used tool for investigating the possible direction of the relation between particular skills and word reading ability: Cause or consequence. This paper outlines an analogous method for identifying candidate causes of reading comprehension failure, the `comprehension-age match design' and discusses the strengths and limitations of this design.
Young children's reading comprehension skill is associated with their ability to draw infere... more Young children's reading comprehension skill is associated with their ability to draw inferences (Oakhill 1982, 1984). An experiment was conducted to investigate the direction of this relation and to explore possible sources of inferential failure. Three groups of children participated: Same-age skilled and less skilled comprehenders, and a comprehension-age match group. The pattern of performance indicated that the ability to make inferences was not a by-product of good reading comprehension, rather that good inference skills are a plausible cause of good reading comprehension ability. Failure to make inferences could not be attributed to lack of relevant general knowledge. Instead, the pattern of errors indicated that differences in reading strategy were the most likely source of these group differences.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 1998
Elliptical verb phrases must be interpreted indirectly, using a representation of the surface for... more Elliptical verb phrases must be interpreted indirectly, using a representation of the surface form of nearby (usually preceding) text. We used this fact to demonstrate the different availability of superficial representations of the two clauses in main-subordinate pairs. The acceptability of a later ellipsis was reduced when it took its meaning from a main clause that was followed by a subordinate clause, as compared with other combinations. In addition, positive acceptability judgements were made more quickly (1) when the antecedent clause was subordinate, rather than main, suggesting that the superficial form of a subordinate clause is more important, and (2) when the antecedent was in the immediately preceding clause, rather than two clauses back. These results support the idea that the surface form of subordinate clauses is selectively retained until the corresponding main clause has been read, but the surface form of a main clause is not retained after it has been interpreted.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 1996
Four experiments were carried out to investigate how general knowledge about the stereotypical ge... more Four experiments were carried out to investigate how general knowledge about the stereotypical gender of participants in a text influences comprehension. A self-paced reading task was used to present short texts comprising one, two, or three sentences. The first sentence of each text introduced a stereotypically masculine or feminine participant (e.g. doctor, nurse), or a neutral one. The last sentence introduced a pronoun (he/she) that could match or mismatch the gender of the referent. The first experiment, which was carried out in English, showed that reading times for the last sentence were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the pronoun in the last sentence and the stereotypical gender of the referent in the first sentence. In contrast to English, the gender of the participant can be disambiguated by a preceding article ( el/la) in Spanish. The results of the second, third, and fourth experiments, which were carried out in Spanish, showed that reading times for the first sentences were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the article and the stereotypical gender of the participant. However, reading times for the last sentences did not differ. Overall, the results suggest that information about the stereotypical gender of the participants in a text is incorporated into the representation as soon as it becomes available, and that it affects the ease with which the text is understood.
In this study we investigated the relation between young children's comprehension skill and infer... more In this study we investigated the relation between young children's comprehension skill and inferencemaking ability using a procedure that controlled individual differences in general knowledge (Barnes & Dennis, 1998; Barnes, Dennis, & Haefele-Kalvaitis,1996). A multiepisode story was read to the children, and their ability to make two types of inference was assessed: coherence inferences, which were essential for adequate comprehension of the text, and elaborative inferences, which enhanced the text representation but which were not crucial to understanding. There was a strong relation between comprehension skill and inference-making ability even when knowledge was equally available to all participants. Subsidiary analyses of the source of inference failures revealed different underlying sources of difficulty for good and poor comprehenders.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2008
Purpose The aim was to identify the source of idiom understanding difficulties in children with s... more Purpose The aim was to identify the source of idiom understanding difficulties in children with specific reading comprehension failure. Method Two groups ( n s = 15) of 9- to 10-year-olds participated. One group had age-appropriate word reading and reading comprehension; the other group had age-appropriate word reading but poor reading comprehension. Each child completed an independent assessment of semantic analysis skills and 2 multiple-choice assessments of idiom comprehension. In 1 assessment, idiomatic phrases were embedded in supportive story contexts; in the other assessment, they were presented out of context. Performance on transparent idioms (which are amenable to interpretation by semantic analysis) and opaque idioms (which can only be interpreted by inference from context if the meaning is not known) was compared. Results The groups demonstrated comparable semantic analysis skills and understanding of transparent idioms. Children with poor comprehension were impaired in ...
... Indeed, it is currently estimated that at least half of the world's children ...... more ... Indeed, it is currently estimated that at least half of the world's children ... between concurrentmeasures of morphological awareness and multiple outcome measures by using ... English and French lexical orthographic processing, after substantive controls, but no such correlations ...
... comprehension. They end with their recommendations for future initiatives in readingcomprehen... more ... comprehension. They end with their recommendations for future initiatives in readingcomprehension assessment. ... Comprehension'. The assessment of comprehension in pre-readers and young developing readers presents a challenge. Paul ...
Poor comprehenders have intact word-reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding w... more Poor comprehenders have intact word-reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding what they read. We investigated whether two metalinguistic skills, morphological and syntactic awareness, are specifically related to poor reading comprehension by including separate and combined measures of each. We identified poor comprehenders ( n = 15) and average comprehenders ( n = 15) in Grade 4 who were matched on word-reading accuracy and speed, vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability, and age. The two groups performed comparably on a morphological awareness task that involved both morphological and syntactic cues. However, poor comprehenders performed less well than average comprehenders on a derivational word analogy task in which there was no additional syntactic information, thus tapping only morphological awareness, and also less well on a syntactic awareness task, in which there were no morphological manipulations. Our task and participant-selection process ruled out key no...
Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and infer... more Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared to adults (Experiment One) and 11-to 12-year-olds (Experiment Two). The results broadly support the Global Elaboration Model of figurative competence (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995) with a notable exception: even the youngest children were able to use semantic analysis to derive the meanings of transparent idioms, as well as being sensitive to meaning in context. The findings show that young children process language at both the small-grained phrasal-level as well as the discourse-level to establish figurative meaning and demonstrate that the language processing skills that aid idiom comprehension, as well as idiom knowledge itself, are still not fully developed in 11-to 12-year-olds.
Two studies investigating young readers' use of conjunctions are reported. In Study One, 145 ... more Two studies investigating young readers' use of conjunctions are reported. In Study One, 145 eight- to ten-year-olds completed one of two narrative cloze tasks in which different types of conjunction were deleted. Performance for additive conjunctions was not affected by age in this study, but older children were more likely to select the target conjunction than were younger children for temporal, causal, and adversative terms. Performance was superior in the cloze task in which they were given a restricted choice of responses (three vs. seven). In Study Two, 35 eight- and nine-year-old good and poor comprehenders completed the three-choice cloze task. The poor comprehenders were less likely to select the target terms in general. Sentence-level comprehension skills did not account for their poor performance. The results indicate that understanding of the semantic relations expressed by conjunctions is still developing long after these terms are used correctly in children's s...
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