Reading Skill and Memory for Spoken and Written Discourse

Abstract

One aspect of the relationship between reading comprehension and language comprehension was investigated through the comparison of listening and reading for two memory tasks differing in the extent to which organization appears to be required. Fifth grade children matched on IQ but representing two levels of reading achievement heard and read passages and were tested by literal questions and paraphrase recall. Performance of the skilled readers exceeded that of less-skilled readers by equal amounts for reading and listening and by equal amounts for paraphrase recall and literal question answering. The results suggest (a) that reading comprehension and listening comprehension depend on the same general language processing skills and that (b) localized processing skills, i.e., encoding more immediate language units, rather than global organizational skills, i.e., organizing and integrating larger language units into meaningful relationships, are a major source of individual differences in language processing.