How storage and executive functions contribute to children's reading comprehension

Nouwens, Suzan; Groen, Margriet A.; Verhoeven, Ludo

doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2015.12.008

Cited by 56 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Given the established connections between EF and word reading (e.g., Arrington et al, ; Rose et al, ; van der Sluis et al, ), it is possible that none of the EF components will survive as a predictor of reading comprehension the statistical control of reading fluency. Second, although there are a few studies on EF and comprehension in children (e.g., Christopher et al, ; Kieffer et al, ; Nouwens et al, ), to our knowledge, no studies have been conducted with young adults. This is important because young adults are expected to read long and often complicated texts, which requires integration of information across multiple paragraphs, inhibition of irrelevant information and comprehension monitoring.…”

Section: The Present Studysupporting

confidence: 89%

“…An issue that also remains unresolved is whether the effects of the EF components on reading comprehension are direct or indirect through the effects of word reading and oral language skills. Most previous studies examining the effects of EF components on reading comprehension have used word reading and vocabulary as control variables and not as mediators (e.g., Blair & Razza, ; Cutting et al, ; Guajardo & Cartwright, ; Nouwens, Groen, & Verhoeven, ; Sesma et al, ). To our knowledge, only Kieffer et al () have examined the indirect effects of EF components on reading comprehension through reading accuracy and vocabulary and have found that shifting, but not inhibition or working memory, had a small indirect effect on reading comprehension through vocabulary.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Direct and indirect effects of executive function on reading comprehension in young adults

Georgiou

Das

2016

Journal Research in Reading

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The purpose of this study was to examine what components of executive function (EF)inhibition, shifting and updating/working memorypredict reading comprehension in young adults. Ninety university students (65 females, 25 males; mean age = 21.82 years) were assessed on shifting (Planned Connections and Colour/Shape Shifting), inhibition (Colour-Word Stroop and Number Stroop), updating/working memory (Digit Memory and Listening Span), reading fluency (Word Reading Efficiency), vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), and reading comprehension (Nelson-Denny Reading Test). The results of path analysis indicated that only shifting predicted directly reading comprehension. These findings extend those of previous studies showing that different EF components predict different reading outcomes and suggest that EF has a place in reading comprehension models over and above traditional predictors of reading comprehension such as reading fluency and vocabulary.

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Section: The Present Studysupporting

confidence: 89%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Direct and indirect effects of executive function on reading comprehension in young adults

Georgiou

Das

2016

Journal Research in Reading

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“…Numerous studies show that vocabulary is a factor that influences reading comprehension in the middle school (which the students include in our study attended) directly and indirectly. Indirectly by facilitating the process of decoding and releasing some of the capacities of the working memory for word processing or understanding (Nouwens, Groen, & Verhoeven, 2015;Pečjak, 2011;Rydland, Grøver Aukrust, & Fulland, 2012). However, Pečjak, Podlesek and Pirc (2009) found a moderate direct effect of reading vocabulary on reading comprehension (r = 0.51), which is consistent with the results of other studies (Elleman, Lindo, Morphy, & Compton, 2009;Nagy & Townsend, 2012).…”

Section: Relations Between Summarizing and Students' General Reading supporting

confidence: 82%

Developing Summarizing Skills in 4th Grade Students: Intervention Programme Effects

Pečjak¹,

Pirc²

2018

iejee

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The aim of our study was to determine whether summarizing skills could be developed in 4th grade primary school students. We designed a 5-month intervention programme as an experimental study, in which teachers trained students in the experimental group in their ability to summarize, which is one of the important strategies that enhance reading comprehension. 190 students in 4th grade from 8 primary schools in Slovenia participated in the study. We evaluated students' general reading competency, their metacognitive knowledge about reading and their ability to make summaries of two short and one longer expository text (pretest, posttest and follow-up test). The general reading competency explained the most variance in summarizing at pretest and posttest by experimental and control group of students. In the follow-up test, the summarizing from posttest was the strongest predictor in both groups and in the experimental group also the metacognitive knowledge about reading. The results showed that teachers can develop summarizing skills in students by systematically training them to use these skills, but the training effects decrease if the learning environment does not encourage students to use these skills.

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“…Thus, we predicted that rhetorical competence, a linguistic skill, would show an increasing influence with grade and decoding ability. Working memory, which is predictive of reading comprehension in this age group (Borella & de Ribaupierre, 2014;Nouwens, Groen, & Verhoeven, 2016), might also moderate the relationship between rhetorical competence and expository reading comprehension because readers who act on the instruction contained in the rhetorical device will need to sustain information in working memory in order to establish connections or manipulate ideas. Poor working memory capacity can constrain an individual's ability to represent more than the current sentence in a text, so poor working memory might limit the ability to benefit from rhetorical devices in text.…”

Section: Rhetorical Competence Throughout Primary School and Its Inflmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-sectional study of the contribution of rhetorical competence to children's expository texts comprehension between third- and sixth-grade

García

Sanchez

Cain

et al. 2019

Learning and Individual Differences

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Readers' rhetorical competence is related to reading comprehension and moderates the impact of rhetorical devices in expository texts. In this cross-sectional study, we examine the differences in four measures of rhetorical competence (knowledge of anaphors, organizational signals, refutations, and a total score) in grades three through to six, we determine its contribution to expository text comprehension after controlling the effect of a wide set of linguistic and cognitive variables, and we study whether this contribution is moderated by grade or any of our control variables. First, although we found evidence for some level of rhetorical competence at early ages, data suggest that rhetorical competence development takes many years. Second, we found that knowledge of some rhetorical devices is acquired before knowledge of others. Finally, rhetorical competence was a unique predictor of expository text comprehension, and its influence was evident regardless of grade and all of the control variables. Most research on rhetorical competence concerns students at the end of the primary school or older. This is surprising given that, typically from third grade, children are expected to learn from expository texts across a wide range of subject matter (Best et al., 2008). For this reason, we conducted a cross-sectional study of Spanish students to determine how rhetorical competence develops and its role in the comprehension of expository texts during the elementary school years. The aims of this study were: (1) to describe Spanish students' rhetorical competence from grade three (8-9 years) to six (11-12 years), (2) to determine whether rhetorical competence makes a unique contribution to children's comprehension of expository text in this age range, Rhetorical competence and expository text comprehension in primary 4 above and beyond variables known to be strongly related to comprehension (namely word decoding, integration/inference skills, prior knowledge, and working memory), and (3) to examine whether the contribution of rhetorical competence to expository text comprehension was moderated by grade, or the other variables outlined above. 1.1. Rhetorical devices and rhetorical competence Rhetorical devices are signals that work as ''potential processing instructions'' for understanding the meaning of a discourse without affecting its organization or

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How storage and executive functions contribute to children's reading comprehension

Cited by 56 publications

References 47 publications

Direct and indirect effects of executive function on reading comprehension in young adults

Direct and indirect effects of executive function on reading comprehension in young adults

Developing Summarizing Skills in 4th Grade Students: Intervention Programme Effects

Cross-sectional study of the contribution of rhetorical competence to children's expository texts comprehension between third- and sixth-grade

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