What makes skilled adult readers good at comprehension?
In adult readers of Portuguese, understanding spoken language, vocabulary and awareness of word parts predicted reading comprehension, while basic word-decoding accuracy mattered only indirectly.
Source
Reading Comprehension Predictors in European Portuguese Adults
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session battery of reading and language tasks in typical adult readers, analysed with hierarchical regression and path/mediation models of the Simple View of Reading.
- N
- N=67 · 67 typical adult readers (54 women), mostly college students; no separate experiments.
- Population
- European Portuguese-speaking adults aged 19-47 with no reading, neurological or psychiatric diagnosis, 86.6% college students
- Outcome
- Reading comprehension of a 495-word text (literal, inferential and vocabulary-in-context questions), predicted by word reading, oral language comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, morphological and phonological awareness, RAN and working memory
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What they did
The researchers gave 67 Portuguese-speaking adults, mostly university students, a battery of tasks: a 495-word text with comprehension questions, a matched listening-comprehension task, timed word and pseudoword reading, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid naming of digits and letters, backward digit span, and two spoken tasks tapping morphological awareness (spotting real suffixes). They then tested whether the two-part Simple View of Reading (word reading plus oral comprehension) explained comprehension, whether adding vocabulary and fluency helped, and whether other skills worked directly or only through word reading and fluency.
What they found
Word reading and oral language comprehension together explained about 27% of the variance in reading comprehension; oral comprehension looked stronger but the difference was not statistically reliable. Adding vocabulary and fluency explained roughly 7% more, but only vocabulary contributed on its own, and word reading's direct effect vanished, acting mainly through vocabulary. Among the remaining skills, only morphological awareness had a direct effect on comprehension, while phonological decoding and rapid naming did not even correlate with comprehension.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The two central comprehension measures were newly adapted and had poor internal reliability (alphas of 0.49 for reading and 0.40 for listening), which weakens every estimate and may even explain why vocabulary appeared as a separate predictor. With 67 mostly female students the study could detect only moderate effects, and one fit index (RMSEA) indicated poor model fit that the authors set aside. Because all data are correlational and collected at one time, the path models describe statistical associations, not causal routes from skills to comprehension, and they may not apply to struggling readers or to opaque orthographies like English.
Key terms
- Simple View of Reading
- A model stating that reading comprehension is the product of decoding (word reading) and oral language comprehension.
- Orthographic transparency
- How consistently letters map onto sounds in a writing system; Portuguese is fairly consistent, English much less so.
- Morphological awareness
- Sensitivity to the meaningful parts of words, such as recognising that a word contains a real suffix rather than a look-alike ending.
- Rapid automatized naming (RAN)
- How quickly someone can name a series of familiar items like digits or letters, a known predictor of reading fluency in children.
- Path analysis
- A statistical method that estimates direct and indirect (mediated) relationships among several variables at once.
- Mediation
- When one variable affects an outcome partly or wholly through an intermediate variable, here whether skills act on comprehension via word reading and fluency.
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Quiz yourself
Which predictor showed a direct effect on reading comprehension after mediation was allowed?
Common questions
Does this mean decoding doesn't matter for reading comprehension?
Not exactly. In these skilled adults word reading still related to comprehension, but its effect ran mainly through vocabulary, probably because fluent decoders are no longer limited by decoding in a consistent spelling system.
Why did the Simple View explain less variance here than in other studies?
Earlier high figures often came from struggling readers whose comprehension still depends heavily on decoding; also, the unreliable comprehension measures here cap how much variance any predictor can explain.
Should vocabulary be added to the Simple View as a third component?
These data point that way, but the authors caution that vocabulary might simply be picking up what the unreliable listening measure missed, so better measures are needed first.
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