The relationship between domain-general cognitive skills and reading comprehension in children

The aim of this research was to better understand how reading comprehension happens in children. In particular, the main objective was to examine, in detail, the relationship between higher-level comprehension skills and domain-general cognitive skills at a crucial period of development – the time when children are becoming independent readers (8 to 10 years of age). The novelty of this research was that different from previous studies it i) looked at all five higher-level comprehension skills separately and in their relationship to domain-general cognitive skills; ii) examined domain-general cognitive skills simultaneously rather than in isolation; iii) considered the moderating role of the lower-level comprehension skills in this relationship; and iv) provided valuable insight on how reading comprehension is achieved in a language with transparent orthography. The findings demonstrated that higher-level comprehension skills are underpinned by working memory and executive functions in both age groups of children, but their contribution to higher-level comprehension skills increased around the age of 10. Furthermore, the results of this thesis showed that working memory and executive functions significantly interacted with reading fluency in predicting higher-level comprehension skills in both age groups, albeit in the younger group this interaction was present only in necessary inference while in older group this interaction was present only in literal comprehension and comprehension control.