Children's Reading Comprehension Ability: Concurrent Prediction by Working Memory, Verbal Ability, and Component Skills.

TLDR

A longitudinal study examined how working memory capacity relates to reading comprehension in children aged 8, 9, and 11. At each assessment, researchers measured reading ability, vocabulary, verbal skills, two working memory tasks (sentence‑span and digit span), and comprehension component skills. Working memory and the comprehension components of inference making, monitoring, and story‑structure each uniquely predicted reading comprehension beyond word reading, vocabulary, and verbal ability, and inference making and monitoring contributed independent variance not fully mediated by working memory.

Abstract

The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children's reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit working memory), and component skills of comprehension. At each time point, working memory and component skills of comprehension (inference making, comprehension monitoring, story structure knowledge) predicted unique variance in reading comprehension after word reading ability and vocabulary and verbal ability controls. Further analyses revealed that the relations between reading comprehension and both inference making and comprehension monitoring were not wholly mediated by working memory. Rather, these component skills explained their own unique variance in reading comprehension.