Levels of Comprehension Monitoring and Working Memory in Good and Poor Comprehenders

Abstract

This paper reports two studies that investigate differences in comprehension monitoring skills between good and poor comprehenders. Two groups of 9-to 10-year-olds, who were matched for reading vocabulary and word recognition skills but who differed in comprehension skill, were selected. In the first study, in which the children were required to find anomalous words and phrases, the skilled comprehenders engaged in more accurate monitoring of sentence level anomalies (but not word level anomalies) than did the poorer comprehenders. In the second study, the comprehension monitoring task required the children to detect pairs of sentences, in short texts, that were contradictory. In addition, the working memory demands of the task were varied by placing the two items of inconsistent information either in adjacent sentences, or in sentences that were separated in the text by several others. As in the first study, less-skilled comprehenders performed more poorly on the detection task, but the difference between the groups was considerably more pronounced when the sentences were separated than when they were adjacent. In addition, the children were given a numerical working memory test, and the poorer comprehenders performed more poorly on this test. However, although working memory performance was related to performance on some of the error detection tasks, comprehension ability was also a good, and sometimes better, predictor. The results are discussed in terms of the different cognitive abilities that might contribute to efficient comprehension monitoring.

The role of vocabulary, working memory and inference making ability in reading comprehension in Down syndrome

“…There is also evidence for deficits in higher level processes such as verbal working memory (Nation, Adams, Bowyer-Crane & Snowling, 1999), comprehension monitoring (Oakhill, Hartt & Samols, 2005) and inference generation (Cain, Oakhill, Barnes & Bryant, 2001). argue that a difficulty making inferences is causally related to the reading comprehension deficit as such difficulties are poorer than expected given overall comprehension level.…”

Capacidade de automonitoramento da compreensão leitora no Ensino Fundamental

“…On the other hand, not all the tasks designed to assess self-monitoring while reading showed evidence of the expected difference. The assessment of spontaneous self-monitoring at word level showed no differences in the performance of schoolchildren with best and worst comprehension skills (10) ( Table 1). G1 as G2 presented similar average performance.…”

“…One of them, as well as the 8 questions attached to it, composed the original protocol (10) which was translated and linguistically/culturally adapted to Brazilian Portuguese. The other 3 narrative texts and their questions were developed by the same team.…”

“…Thus, the condition of spontaneous monitoring was evaluated first and then, directed monitoring. The instructions followed what is indicated by Oakhill et al (10) .…”

“…The ability to define strategies to improve comprehension can distinguish good from poor readers (3,(6)(7)(8)(9) . The hypothesis that conditions of the self-monitoring ability during reading may be associated with specific deficits in reading comprehension (10,11) guided this research.…”