Background: Reading and listening comprehension are essential for accessing the school curriculum. Inference-making is integral to successful comprehension and involves integrating information between clauses (local coherence) and integrating information with background knowledge (global coherence). We require appropriate methods to assess…

We examined knowledge-based inference in 6-, 8- and 10-year-olds. Participants listened to texts where the number of clues for an inference was manipulated and then judged whether single-word probes (target inference, competing inference, literal word from the text and an unrelated concept) were related to the story. Accuracy and response times…

Background: Morphological awareness plays a crucial role in supporting higher-level text processing. We examined its contribution to reading comprehension in children of different ages and ability levels in order to determine when and for whom morphological awareness is of particular importance. Methods: Three groups of children (aged 6-8 years, N…

We investigated the extent to which working memory and behavioral attention predicted reading and listening comprehension in grades 1 through 3 and, whether their relative contributions differed by modality and grade. Separate grade samples (N = 370; ns = 125, 123, and 122 for grades 1, 2, and 3 respectively) completed multiple measures of word…

Purpose: This study investigated the extent to which comprehension monitoring in children's first and second language predicts reading comprehension. Method: Children's ability to detect inconsistencies in orally presented stories was measured by response to a judgment question about whether the story made sense and by the identification of the…

Background: Children's comprehension of single texts relies on both foundational and higher-level skills. These are also assumed to support multiple-document comprehension, but their relative importance has not been examined, to date. Multiple-document comprehension additionally requires the identification and use of information about each…

We examined sixth graders' detection of inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages, contrasting participants who were monolingual speakers (N = 85) or Spanish-English DLLs (N = 94) when recruited in pre-kindergarten (PK). We recorded self-paced reading times and judgments about whether the text made sense, and took an independent measure…

We examined the quality of 4- to 6-year-olds' production of narratives from picture sequences. Children (N = 81) first viewed a narrative picture sequence and then completed the narrative production task in each of two orders: either before or after answering a set of questions about the core elements of the story. Narratives elicited after…

The authors examined teachers' (N = 19) use of different question types during small-group comprehension instruction for 6-11-year-olds (N = 115). The authors tagged the corpus of 40 hours of guided reading sessions to enable computer-based searches for syntactic forms of questions. Teachers frequently asked high-challenge "wh-" word…

Background: Comprehension is critical for classroom learning and educational success. Inferences are integral to good comprehension: successful comprehension requires the listener to generate local coherence inferences, which involve integrating information between clauses, and global coherence inferences, which involve integrating textual…

We examined the relationship between inference making, vocabulary knowledge, and verbal working memory on children's reading comprehension in 62 6th graders (aged 12). The effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension was predicted to be partly mediated by inference making for two reasons: Inference making often taps the semantic…

In a touch-screen paradigm, we recorded 3- to 7-year-olds' (N = 108) accuracy and response times (RTs) to assess their comprehension of 2-clause sentences containing "before" and "after". Children were influenced by order: performance was most accurate when the presentation order of the 2 clauses matched the chronological order…

Background: Children with diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) frequently have reading problems. To date, it is not clear whether poor reading is associated with both inattention and hyperactivity and also whether poor reading comprehension is the result of poor word reading skills or more general language comprehension…

The twofold purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the relative importance of decoding skills to reading comprehension in reading development and to identify which reader characteristics and reading assessment characteristics contribute to differences in the decoding and reading comprehension correlation. A meta-analysis of 110 studies…

Purpose: Although deaf children typically exhibit severe delays in reading achievement, there is a paucity of research looking at their text-level comprehension skills. We present a comparison of deaf and normally hearing readers' profiles on a commonly used reading comprehension assessment: the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability II. Methods:…