Phonological skills and comprehension failure: A test of the phonological processing deficit hypothesis

Shankweiler and colleagues argue that text comprehension problems in young children arise from phonological processing difficulties. Their work has focused on children with poor word reading ability. We investigated this hypothesis for children who experience comprehension difficulties in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. We found that good and poor comprehenders performed comparably on various measures of phonological processing and differed on a task that made greater demands on working memory, Bradley and Bryant's odd-word-out task. In a final study, hierarchical regression analyses supported this distinction: the odd-word-out task was a strong predictor of reading comprehension performance even after IQ, vocabulary and single word reading had been controlled for, but a less memory-dependent phonological task was not. These studies support previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders' problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties.