Do memory and attention matter more for listening or reading?
Young children's working memory and attention mattered somewhat more for understanding spoken stories than written ones, and they helped reading comprehension mainly by supporting word reading and listening skills.
Source
Are working memory and behavioral attention equally important for both reading and listening comprehension? A developmental comparison
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Concurrent multilevel regressions and path models in grades 1-3, plus a two-year longitudinal path model from grade 1 to grade 3, drawn from a larger longitudinal reading study.
- N
- N=370 · 370 children in 121 classrooms for the concurrent analyses (125 in grade 1, 123 in grade 2, 122 in grade 3); the 125 grade 1 children were followed to grade 3 for the longitudinal model.
- Population
- Typically developing US children in grades 1-3 recruited through schools at four university sites.
- Outcome
- Passage-based reading comprehension and listening comprehension scores.
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers tested 370 children in grades 1, 2 and 3 on working memory tasks, word and nonword reading, and matched passage-based tests of reading and listening comprehension, while teachers and parents rated each child's attention. They used multilevel models that account for children being grouped in classrooms, first to see how much extra variance memory and attention explained, then to test whether their effects on reading comprehension ran directly or through word reading and listening comprehension. The grade 1 group was retested two years later to test the same pathways over time.
What they found
Together, memory and attention explained about 11-12% of extra variance in reading comprehension but 16-25% in listening comprehension, and working memory's role looked largest in grade 3. Attention no longer predicted reading comprehension uniquely in grade 3. Once word reading and listening comprehension were in the model, neither memory nor attention had a direct effect on reading comprehension; their influence was indirect. Longitudinally, grade 1 memory and attention predicted grade 3 reading comprehension only through word reading and listening comprehension, with the model explaining 39.5% of child-level variation.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The data are correlational, so the path models describe plausible routes rather than proving that memory or attention cause comprehension gains. The reading-versus-listening difference was not statistically significant when the coefficients were formally compared, so it should be treated as a trend. Attention was measured only by adult rating scales, which may be biased by what teachers and parents know about a child's comprehension, and the passages were not counterbalanced across the two modalities. The grade 1 listening test had only adequate reliability.
Key terms
- Working memory
- The mental workspace that holds information for a short time while it is being processed or manipulated, such as keeping track of a story while hearing new sentences.
- Simple View of Reading
- A model proposing that reading comprehension is the product of two skills: decoding written words and understanding language.
- Mediation (indirect effect)
- When one variable influences an outcome by first influencing an intermediate variable, as when memory helps listening comprehension, which then helps reading comprehension.
- Multilevel model
- A statistical model that accounts for data being nested in groups, such as children within classrooms, so that classroom similarities do not distort results.
- Mental model (situation model)
- The reader's or listener's internal representation of what a text means, built up as each new sentence is integrated.
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Quiz yourself
Which outcome did working memory and attention explain more variance in?
Common questions
Why might working memory matter more for listening than for reading?
A reader can slow down and re-read, but a listener must keep up with the speaker's pace and cannot review what was said, so holding and updating information in memory is more demanding.
Does this mean training working memory will improve reading comprehension?
Not necessarily. The study is correlational and found only indirect links, so it shows that memory is associated with the building blocks of comprehension, not that boosting memory will raise comprehension.
What is the practical message for teachers?
Presenting material orally is not automatically easier for beginning or struggling readers, and older primary pupils with weak working memory may need extra support as texts get longer and more complex.
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