We can expect the comprehension of written language to approximate the comprehension of spoken language. When that happens, then reading comprehension has developed, for practical purposes, to its limiting or asymptotic level. (It is possible for reading comprehension skill to develop so as to exceed listening comprehension skill, but that is another matter.) All other limitations are imposed by linguistic abilities, relevant knowledge, and general intelligence. If we make things more complex than this, we push onto the concept of reading comprehension all these other important aspects of cognition, with the muddle that results from conceptual conflation.This simple idea that the acquisition of reading comprehension is learning to understand writing as well as one understands spoken language has empirical justification. At the beginning of learning to read, the correlations between reading and spoken language comprehension are small (Curtis, 1980; Sticht & James, 1984). This is because at the beginning, children are learning to decode and identify words, so it is these word-reading processes that limit comprehension. However, as children move beyond the beginnings of learning to read, the correlations between reading comprehension and spoken language comprehension increase and then level out by high school (Sticht & James, 1984). As children learn to read words, the limiting factor in reading comprehension shifts from word recognition to spoken language comprehension. For adult college student samples,

We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers. For print-related activation, we observed a shared set of skill-correlated regions, including left hemisphere temporoparietal and occipitotemporal sites, as well as inferior frontal, visual, visual attention, and subcortical components. For speech-related activation, shared variance among reading skill measures was most prominently correlated with activation in left hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus and precuneus. Implications for brain-based models of literacy acquisition are discussed.

A treatment program including ultrasound biofeedback is a viable option for improving speech sound accuracy in children with persisting speech sound errors associated with CAS.

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