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Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties
Introduction
Text comprehension draws on many different language skills. These include lower-level lexical skills: word
reading efficiency and vocabulary knowledge, sentence-level skills (knowledge of grammatical structure) and
higher-level text processing skills: inference generation, comprehension monitoring and working memory
capacity. Higher-level skills are related to text comprehension because they enable the reader to make the
necessary integrative and inferential links to construct a meaning-based representation of the text. Efficient
lower-level lexical skills facilitate reading comprehension by enabling more resources to be devoted to higher-
level processes.
Concurrent measures of vocabulary, working memory, inference making and comprehension monitoring are
related to reading comprehension skills in 7-10 year olds. Longitudinal studies have shown that vocabulary and
working memory and word reading, grammatical awareness and vocabulary are related to later reading
comprehension.
Children with reading comprehension difficulties show impairment on a range of language tasks. Poor
comprehends demonstrate deficits on higher-level skills relative to same-age good comprehends. Impairments
have been found on measures of working memory, inference making, narrative production and comprehension
monitoring. Weaknesses in syntactic knowledge and processing have also been reported. When vocabulary,
word reading accuracy and/or non-word reading are allowed to vary, lower-level lexical weakness in exception
word reading and semantic processing are also apparent.
Caution for what we conclude from studies for following reasons:
1. There are four different ways that a skill can be related to comprehension ability: it may be a prerequisite
of reading comprehension, a facilitator, a consequence or an incidental correlate. Comparisons between
good and poor comprehenders do not distinguish between these alternatives.
2. Such comparisons do not establish whether poor comprehenders in general present a particular deficit or
whether every poor comprehender presents that deficit. Different patterns of strength and weakness were
evident across a range of measures important for text comprehension and not all poor comprehenders
experience impairments in all of the skills. There may be subtypes of poor comprehenders with different
fundamental weaknesses.
Potential fundamental weakness is verbal ability, which is strongly correlated with reading comprehension.
Purpose of the study, there are three central issues related to poor reading comprehension:
1. Variations in language and cognitive skills in children with poor reading comprehension
Are there consistent language and cognitive skill deficit associated with poor reading comprehension skills
at 8 years of age?
2. Relations between verbal and vocabulary ability and literacy development in children with poor reading
comprehension
Does poor verbal ability or vocabulary knowledge result in a more severe comprehension impairment at 8
years or affect the progress made in reading between 8 and 11 years?
3. Persistence and educational implications of a comprehension impairment
How does poor comprehension when aged 8 impact upon later reading performance an education
attainment?
Method
Two groups of children, good and poor comprehenders -> 23 in each group. First assessed at 7/8 years.
A number of reading and reading-related skills were measured using standardized assessments and own
experimental measures:
1. Vocabulary knowledge -> sight vocabulary was assessed using the Gates-MacGinitie Test (select one out of
four words to go with an accompanying picture). Receptive vocabulary was assessed using the British
Picture Vocabulary Scales.
2. Memory -> one assessment was a listening span task in which children were required to provide a single
word completion for a sentence spoken by the experimenter (processing component) and remember that
word for later recall (storage component). Other assessment was a digit reading task. Children read out
loud groups of three digits (processing) and remembered the final digit for later recall (storage).
,3. Knowledge of syntax -> Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG).
4. General intellectual ability -> estimates of verbal and non-verbal intelligence were made using the WISC-III.
Two subtest form the verbal scale (vocabulary and similarities) and two form the performance scale (block
design and object assembly).
5. Specific comprehension subskills -> three subskills were assessed:
- Comprehension monitoring -> children read stories, some of which contained pairs of inconsistent
statements. Task was to underline the bits that did not make sense together.
- Inference and integration skill -> assessed using integration task, which assesses the ability to make
constructive inferences between two sentences in there-line texts.
- Knowledge about story structure -> two tasks: Firs was a story anagram task in which children put
together stories that had been cut up into sentences and randomized. Understanding of the purpose of
story titles (sorts of information about characters, locations and events that titles contain) was assessed by
a structured interview.
Outcome measures were taken when children were aged 10/11. By 16 good comprehenders and 17 poor
comprehenders we had access to their Key Stage 2 Standard Assessment Tests (SATS) in English, math and
science. We also assessed the listening comprehension skills of 16 children in each group -> Neale Analysis of
Reading Ability, Form 2. Also Cognitive Abilities Tests for verbal and quantities and non-verbal reasoning.
Results
Skills that differentiate good and poor comprehenders at Time 1
The two groups differed on many comprehension-related skills that have differentiated similarly selected
groups in previous work: namely verbal working memory, the ability to structure stories, knowledge about the
purpose of story titles, inference and integration and comprehension monitoring. The two groups did not differ
on the digit working memory measure. There was little evidence of more generalized language and verbal
impairments. The groups did not obtain significantly different scores on the measure of syntactic knowledge,
but the good comprehenders obtained significantly higher scores on the measure of receptive vocabulary. The
two groups obtained comparable scores on the performance ability measure of the WISC-III although the good
comprehenders demonstrated marginally higher verbal ability scores.
Variations in language and cognitive skills in children with poo reading comprehension
The majority of the poor comprehenders performed below the sample mean on all measures with the
exception of the two vocabulary measures, were a majority obtained above mean scores. For the working
memory measures, 9 of 23 children obtained below means scores on both measures, and 12 of the 23 poor
comprehenders obtained below means scores on three or four of the comprehension subskills. The majority of
poor comprehenders did not present a receptive vocabulary deficit in relation to age-appropriate performance.
Although the poor comprehenders mean VIQ (verbal scale of WISC-II) score was only marginally lower than
that obtained by the good comprehenders, the majority of this group obtained VIC scores that were blow the
mean for their age.
Relations between verbal and vocabulary ability and literacy development in children with poor reading
comprehensions
There was no evidence for the specific verbal ability deficit. Poor comprehenders obtained mean PIC standard
scores (performance scale of WISC-III) that were comparable to their VIQ scores.
13 Children obtained an average score from the IQ subtests above the population mean of 10 and 10 children
obtained below the population means. These were the high and low cognitive ability groups. 13 Poor
comprehenders obtained a BPVS standardized score above the population mean of 100 and 10 obtained a
score below mean scores. These were the high and low vocabulary groups. The high and low ability (cognitive
and vocabulary) groups did not differ in their reading comprehension and word reading levels at Time 1, but
general cognitive and vocabulary skills at age 8 affected the progress made in reading between 8 and 11 years.
Poor comprehenders with low cognitive ability at Time 1 made significantly less progress in reading
comprehension than those with high cognitive ability. These groups made comparable progress in word
reading development. In contrast, the comparisons between the high and low vocabulary groups reveals a
significant difference in the process made in word reading accuracy. These two groups did not differ
significantly in the progress made in reading comprehension development.
, Persistence of a comprehension impairment
The children classified as good and poor comprehenders at Time 1 differed significantly in their reading
comprehension level three years later. The two groups also differed in their scores on the listening
comprehension measure. There was not a significant difference in word reading level. Poor comprehenders, in
general, maintain their reading comprehension deficit, but poor comprehension at 8 years does not necessarily
lead to depressed word reading development.
Children whose reading comprehension scores were below their chronological age at outcome were classified
as poor comprehenders. One child classified as a poor comprehender at Time 1 obtained an age-appropriate
comprehension score at outcome. In the original good comprehender population, four children obtained
reading comprehension scores below both their chronical age and the same mean at outcome.
Educational implications of a comprehension impairment
The good comprehenders obtained significantly higher scores than the poor comprehenders on all SAT
measures. The standardized scores obtained on the three different assessments of reasoning ability revealed
age-appropriate performance in verbal, non-verbal and quantitative skills for good and poor comprehenders.
However, there was a significant difference between the good and poor comprehenders on the measure of
verbal reasoning. Correlation analyses revealed that verbal reasoning was significantly related to SAT
performance. It was also significantly correlated with both concurrent comprehension, and comprehension
three years later. One factor that might underpin the relation between verbal reasoning and these other
measures is verbal working memory, a skill that is associated with good comprehension. There was little
evidence for that. When working memory scores were partialled out, there were significant correlation
between Time 3 verbal reason comprehension, SATs English and science, although the correlation between
verbal reasoning and SAT maths no longer reached significance.
Discussion
Children with reading comprehension problems presented deficits on a range of literacy assessments
associated with the meaning-based aspects of reading. We did not find consistent deficits associated with poor
reading comprehension (substantial heterogeneity within the population). Although poor comprehenders in
general may suffer from weak monitoring skills or inferior inference marking ability, some poor comprehenders
demonstrate average or even good performance on these tasks relative to peers.
There were no significant differences between good and poor comprehenders knowledge of the meaning of
single written words or grammatical structures. We can speculate that some children in our sample might have
experienced problems in their processing of text because of weak word or sentence level skills, whilst others
may have been limited by weak higher order processing skills.
There was no clear fundamental weakness apparent (results of profiling). This indicates that group comparisons
may obscure crucial weaknesses in the individual. This indicates that reading comprehension level can be
determined by many different language and cognitive factors. Better investigate the interaction between
language and cognitive abilities, rather than a focus on lower- or higher-level reading related skills.
There was no evidence that poor comprehenders with low cognitive or vocabulary skills were more severely
impaired on concurrent measures of language and literacy than their more able peers. Cognitive and verbal
skills do not appear to be prerequisites for the attainment of age-appropriate reading comprehension in the
early stages of reading. However, initial levels of cognitive ability were related to growth in their reading
comprehension and initial levels of receptive vocabulary were related to growth in word reading indicating that
cognitive ability and vocabulary skills act as facilitators of comprehension and word reading.
General information processing an reasoning capacity could underpin growth in text processing skill. There
were no evidence that the good and poor comprehenders differed in reasoning skill in general, when age 11. A
significant and sizable group difference was only found on the measure of verbal reasoning. It may be that poor
comprehenders have an impairment with processing complex information in the verbal domain, but not a
general reasoning impairment.
Vocabulary is associated with good text comprehension, but there is evidence for a relation with word reading
as well. There are strong correlations between vocabulary knowledge and word decoding skill in poor readers.
One possibility for the relation between semantic knowledge and the development of accurate word reading is
the mechanism specific in some connectionist models of word reading. Whereas the meanings of unfamiliar
words are accessed only after decoding, a stronger direct link form the written to the semantic representation
