The relationship between expressive vocabulary knowledge and reading skills for adult struggling readers

Abstract

This study examined expressive vocabulary and its relationship to reading skills for 232 native English-speaking adults who read between the third- and fifth-grade levels. The Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001) was used to measure expressive vocabulary. Participants scored lower than the normative sample of adults on all aspects of the test; they had fewer spontaneously correct answers, and were not helped by stimulus or phonemic cues. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that expressive vocabulary accounted for significant variance in both reading comprehension and exception word reading, but not for general word reading or nonword reading.

Examining the Relationships of Component Reading Skills to Reading Comprehension in Struggling Adult Readers

“…In contrast, Braze et al (2007) found that a composite oral vocabulary knowledge variable accounted for an additional 6% of the reading comprehension variance beyond decoding and listening comprehension. The Braze et al (2007) finding supports the growing body of research indicating the importance of vocabulary knowledge (Fracasso et al, in press; Hall et al, 2014; Mellard et al, 2010; Taylor, Greenberg, Laures-Gore, & Wise, 2012; Tighe, 2012) to reading comprehension in ABE students. Some of these studies have found that vocabulary knowledge remained a significant predictor after controlling for other component skills: decoding (Hall et al, 2014; Taylor et al, 2012), fluency (Taylor et al, 2012), and morphological awareness (Fracasso et al, in press; Tighe, 2012).…”

Can Topic Familiarity Override Language Proficiency in Reading Comprehension?

“…Expressive vocabulary has also been found to affect reading comprehension a great deal (Ricketts et al, 2007). Expressive vocabulary affected adult struggling readers' reading comprehension with a variance of 10.7% (Hall et al, 2014).…”

“…Vocabulary knowledge plays a significant role in understanding a text and limited vocabulary knowledge may bring about comprehension difficulties (Hall et al, 2014;Burgoyne et al, 2013). Ma and Lin (2015), in their study on the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension performance of Taiwanese students, found that subcomponents of vocabulary knowledge correlated significantly with students' reading comprehension performance.…”

Can a lexical decision task predict efficiency in the judgment of ambiguous sentences?

“…Previous research has suggested this connection (Hall, Greenberg, Laures-Gore, & Pae, 2014;Swart et al, 2017), but our study is one of the first to examine a direct connection between lexical processes and efficiency. Also, this is one of the first to find a relationship between reading comprehension and lexical processes in adults.…”