Component skills of text comprehension in less competent Chinese comprehenders.
The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span and tongue-twister), two-character Chinese pseudoword reading (two tasks), rapid automatized naming (RAN) (letters and numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 31 less competent comprehenders compared with 37 reading comprehension control students and 23 chronological age controls. It was hypothesized that the target students would perform poorly on these cognitive and linguistic tasks as compared with their controls. Furthermore, verbal working memory and pseudoword reading would explain a considerable amount of individual variation in Chinese text comprehension. RAN would have a nonsignificant role in text comprehension. Structural equation analyses and hierarchical multiple regression analyses generally upheld these hypotheses. Our findings support current literature of the role of verbal working memory in reading comprehension found in English. The results, however, suggest differential role of the constructs and the tasks in reading comprehension and provide some answers for comprehension impairment in Chinese students.
Leong
Che Kan
CK
Department of Educational Psychology & Special Education, University of Saskatchewan, 28 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Sask, S7N 0X1, Canada. chekan.leong@usask.ca
Hau
Kit Tai
KT
Tse
Shek Kam
SK
Loh
Ka Yee
KY
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001307:Auditory Perception; D002648:Child; D002681:China; D003071:Cognition; D032882:Comprehension; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014706:Verbal Learning