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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 5:1 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press

Children's Difficulties in Text Comprehension: Assessing Causal Issues

Jane Oakhill and Kate Cain

University of Sussex

In this article we consider the difficulties of children who have a specific reading comprehension problem. Our earlier work has shown that good and poor comprehenders differ, in particular, in their ability to make inferences, integrate information in text, understand story structure, and monitor their understanding. We outline some studies that illustrate the poor comprehenders' problems and present two studies that use a comprehension-age match design to explore the direction of causality between comprehension skill and other abilities. We also present data from the first and second stages of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 and 8 to 9 years old. Multiple regression analyses show that a number of factors predict significant variance in comprehension skill even after "general ability" factors such as IQ and vocabulary have been taken into account. These findings suggest that, not only can children have comprehension problems in the absence of word recognition problems, but that distinctly different skills predict variance in word recognition and variance in comprehension. The data support the view that single-word reading skills and the ability to build integrated text representations make independent contributions to overall reading ability. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of children's problems in text comprehension, for deaf readers, and for remediation.

The research reported here was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council grant (R000-23-5438) awarded to Jane Oakhill and Peter Bryant. We thank the staff and pupils from all of the Brighton and Hove schools who participated in this work.

Correspondence should be sent to Jane Oakhill, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QG, England.

Received June 10, 1999; revised July 20, 1999; accepted July 23, 1999


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