The relationship between reading and listening comprehension: shared and modality-specific components

Abstract

This study aimed to increase our understanding on the relationship between reading and listening comprehension. Both in comprehension theory and in educational practice, reading and listening comprehension are often seen as interchangeable, overlooking modality-specific aspects of them separately. Three questions were addressed. First, it was examined to what extent reading and listening comprehension comprise modality-specific, distinct skills or an overlapping, domain-general skill in terms of the amount of explained variance in one comprehension type by the opposite comprehension type. Second, general and modality-unique subskills of reading and listening comprehension were sought by assessing the contributions of the foundational skills word reading fluency, vocabulary, memory, attention, and inhibition to both comprehension types. Lastly, the practice of using either listening comprehension or vocabulary as a proxy of general comprehension was investigated. Reading and listening comprehension tasks with the same format were assessed in 85 second and third grade children. Analyses revealed that reading comprehension explained 34% of the variance in listening comprehension, and listening comprehension 40% of reading comprehension. Vocabulary and word reading fluency were found to be shared contributors to both reading and listening comprehension. None of the other cognitive skills contributed significantly to reading or listening comprehension. These results indicate that only part of the comprehension process is indeed domain-general and not influenced by the modality in which the information is provided. Especially vocabulary seems to play a large role in this domain-general part. The findings warrant a more prominent focus of modality-specific aspects of both reading and listening comprehension in research and education. Keywords Reading comprehension • Listening comprehension • Foundational skills • Simple view of reading M. C. Wolf: Part of the work for this article was carried while writing a master's thesis at the University of Amsterdam.

The unique role of verbal memory, vocabulary, concentration and self-efficacy in children’s listening comprehension in upper elementary grades

“…Consistent with our expectations, vocabulary was the strongest contributor to listening comprehension, and it was even the only direct contributor. This finding underscores the importance of vocabulary knowledge in constructing a situation model (Kintsch & Rawson, 2005;van den Broek et al, 1995) and relates to previous findings that confirm this conceptual relationship with empirical data (Hagtvet, 2003;Kim, 2016;Kim & Phillips, 2014;Lepola et al, 2012;Lervåg et al, 2018;Protopapas et al, 2013;Wolf et al, 2019;Wolfgramm et al, 2016). This contribution seems to remain strong, as our multigroup analysis showed that the contribution of vocabulary was even stronger for the 11-to 12-year-olds than for the 9-to 10-year-olds.…”

Noise, Age, and Gender Effects on Speech Intelligibility and Sentence Comprehension for 11- to 13-Year-Old Children in Real Classrooms

“…Before conducting the experiment, pupils were screened for comprehension problems that could influence the study outcomes. Given the association between listening and reading comprehension (Wolf et al, 2019), a measure of reading comprehension was used for this purpose.…”

The impact of expressive language development and the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus on listening and reading comprehension

“…They also found that the reading comprehension advantage gradually decreases between 2nd and 6th grade as listening and reading comprehension become more interrelated. Moreover, Wolf et al [129] found that in 1st and 2nd graders, 34 and 40% of the variance in listening and reading comprehension was explained by the other comprehension type. This suggests that comprehension taps a general comprehension process, regardless of the comprehension modality.…”