Specific Reading Comprehension Disability: Major Problem, Myth, or Misnomer?

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension. Participants in the study were first, second, and third graders, totaling 9 cohorts and over 425,000 participants in all. The pattern of results was consistent across all cohorts: Less than one percent of first- through third-grade students who scored as poor in reading comprehension were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.

Brain connectivity in children is increased by the time they spend reading books and decreased by the length of exposure to screen‐based media

“…The involvement of regions related to language, visual processing and executive functions in the right hemisphere in our results was also notable, highlighting a previously described role of the right hemisphere in reading comprehension . These results indicate the role of the right hemisphere in comprehension and understanding metaphors and humour during language processing. However, while it is reasonable to speculate such a role, the current study did not examine the effect of reading time on comprehension skills, which would be useful to investigate in future studies.…”

Anomalous gray matter patterns in specific reading comprehension deficit are independent of dyslexia

“…This suggests that while SRCD readers may have intact phonological representations of words, their semantic representations may not be as rich. A more recent large-scale analysis by Spencer, Quinn & Wagner is consistent with previous findings, revealing that most children with SRCD have weaker vocabularies than their TD counterparts (Spencer et al, 2014). These findings suggest that SRCD may arise from difficulty linking lexical to semantic information at the single-word level, despite intact mapping of orthography to phonology, which is impaired in DYS (Perfetti, 2007).…”

Understanding specific reading comprehension deficit: A review

“…Both reading comprehension and spoken language comprehension are highly correlated with vocabulary skill. These relationships hold even when lower‐level skills such as decoding are taken into account (Braze, Tabor, Shankweiler, & Mencl, ; Catts, Fey, & Zhang, ; Landi, ; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, ; Ouellette, ; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, ; Share, Jorm, Maclean, & Matthews, ; Share & Leikin, ; Spencer, Quinn, & Wagner, ; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Feeman, ; Vellutino & Scanlon, ). Thus, it is not surprising that poor vocabulary knowledge has been consistently associated with S‐RCD (Cain & Oakhill, ; Henderson et al, ).…”