Language skills and cognitive processes related to poor reading comprehension performance

Eleven tests were administered to 20 high school readers with learning disabilities (LD) and 20 controls. The objective was to examine the relation between reading comprehension performance and performance on tests of language skills and cognitive processes. As a whole, the performance of the group with LD was significantly below the performance of the controls on all measures. However, the variance on nonverbal tests was greater for the group with LD than for controls; some individuals with learning disabilities performed as well as the controls. Results are discussed in terms of how performance deficits are amenable to remediation by instruction.