Narrative text comprehension: how good and poor reading comprehenders use general working memory and specific...

In this study, we investigated the contribution of verbal working memory (WM) and semantic organization resources in poor and good reading comprehenders (age range: 7.5-11 years). From an initial sample of 151 children, 20 poor and 18 good reading comprehenders were selected and administered a battery of WM tasks -ranging from low to high attentional demands (forward span, backward span, selective word span, and dual task word span)- as well as a semantic WM task involving the manipulation of taxonomic and thematic semantic organization. The findings support the role of working memory (WM) attentional resources, particularly those implicated in the backward span task, in differentiating between skilled and less-skilled reading comprehenders. In addition, a specific contribution of taxonomic and thematic semantic resources emerged. Notably, we observed a correlation between good reading comprehension and stronger taxonomic associations, whereas this relationship was absent in poor comprehenders. Taken together, these findings suggest that specific semantic memory resources contribute to reading comprehension over and above general working memory capacities.