Does weak reading comprehension reflect an integration deficit

Seven- and eight-year-old skilled and less-skilled comprehenders were compared on a sentence recognition task in two conditions varying in memory load and retention interval. Integration of story information during comprehension was indexed by inflated recognition errors of foils that had been constructed by integrating information across original story sentences. Skilled comprehenders exhibited more accurate memory for sentences than less-skilled comprehenders. However, the groups did not differ in the degree to which they integrated information with minimal memory demand, or in their tendency to integrate information and retain the integrated representations with increased memory demand. These results were interpreted as evidence that integration deficits do not lie at the root of reading comprehension difficulties in mainstream children. The purpose of reading comprehension is to understand information presented in the text. Unfortunately, some children find reading comprehension a particularly difficult task. In some cases delayed reading comprehension reflects weak decoding skills. However, 10–15 % of mainstream children exhibit weak reading comprehension despite good decoding skills (e.g. Nation & Snowling, 1997). With reduced ability to derive meaning from written materials, these children’s learning of text-based educational topics is at risk. Failure to understand is therefore a crucial problem. One theory as to why this occurs is that some children fail to integrate information within a text. If true, integration skills may be targeted to motivate and assist children’s reading comprehension in the classroom. This work therefore explores whether an integration deficit underlies reading comprehension difficulties