The role of working memory in skilled and less skilled readers' comprehension

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) whether limitations in less skilled reader's comprehension are related to specific or general working memory (WM) deficiencies and (b) whether WM and short-term memory (STM) independently contribute to the reading comprehension deficits in less skilled readers. For Experiment 1, performance of less skilled readers with learning disabilities (LD), chronological-age (CA)-matched, and reading comprehension level-matched children was compared on verbal and visual- spatial WM measures. The results indicated that (a) less skilled readers' WM performance was comparable on visual-spatial WM measures but inferior to CA-matched children on verbal WM measures and (b) less skilled readers' performance on visual-spatial and verbal WM measures was superior to reading comprehension-matched counterparts, with and without reading recognition scores partialed out in the analysis. Experiment 2 compared children, subgrouped into high and low reading comprehension and high and low reading recognition on WM and phonological STM tasks. The results indicated that the comorbid group (low word recognition and low comprehension) had combined WM and STM deficits. The poor comprehension-only group had low WM but average phonological STM performance, whereas the opposite profile occurred for the poor reading recognition-only group. The results support the hypothesis that less skilled readers suffer WM deficits that contribute to comprehension problems, independent of their problems in phonological coding. The results also support the notion that constraints in an executive system may contribute to the reading comprehension deficits in less skilled readers.