The dissociation of word reading and text comprehension: Evidence from component skills

In this paper, we discuss the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities in accounting for variance in both word reading and text comprehension. We present data from the first and second waves of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 years, and 8 to 9 years old. In multiple regression analyses, we show that there is a dissociation between the skills and abilities that account for variance in word reading, and those that account for variance in text comprehension. The pattern of results is very similar at both time points. Significant variance in comprehension skill is accounted for by measures of text integration, metacognitive monitoring, and working memory. By contrast, these measures do not account for variance in word reading ability, which was best accounted for by a phoneme deletion task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the development of reading ability, children’s problems in text comprehension and for remediation will be discussed.