Poor comprehenders have intact word-reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding what they read. We investigated whether two metalinguistic skills, morphological and syntactic awareness, are specifically related to poor reading comprehension by including separate and combined measures of each. We identified poor comprehenders…

This longitudinal study examined the performance of poor comprehenders on several reading-related abilities in the late elementary school years. We identified 3 groups of readers in Grade 5 who were matched on word reading accuracy and speed, nonverbal cognitive ability, and age: unexpected poor comprehenders, expected average comprehenders, and…

We present a meta-analysis to test the validity of the Simple View of Reading Gough & Tunmer ("Remedial and Special Education," 7:6-10, "1986") for beginner readers of English and other, more transparent, orthographies. Our meta-analytic approach established that the relative influence of decoding and linguistic comprehension on reading…

Considers how the reading-level match design has become a widely-used tool for investigating the possible direction of the relation between particular skills and word reading ability: cause or consequence. Outlines an analogous method for identifying candidate causes of reading comprehension failure, the "comprehension-age match design."…

Investigates the direction of young children's reading comprehension skill in association with their ability to draw inferences and explores possible sources of inferential failure. Finds that the ability to make inferences was not a by-product of good reading comprehension, rather that good inference skills are a plausible cause of good reading…

Investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary terms. Two groups of 15 7-and 8-year-olds participated; children with normally developing reading comprehension skills and children with weak reading comprehension skill. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Presents six experiments that investigate the hypothesis that text comprehension problems in young children arise from phonological processing difficulties for children in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. Supports previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders' problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties.…

Background: Children with fluent and accurate word reading in the presence of poor text comprehension are impaired on a wide range of reading-related tasks. Aims: This study investigated the consistency of skill impairment in a sample of poor comprehenders to identify any fundamental skill weakness that (i) might be associated with poor text…