Cognitive correlates of Chinese text comprehension

Abstract

Text comprehension entails readers a range of cognitive skills to extract, integrate and infer meanings to construct a coherent representation of text. Previous studies suggested that word decoding, textbase level skills (e.g. syntactic and discourse processing), and higher-level processing, such as executive functions (EFs) are important to text comprehension. Although word recognition is fundamental to text comprehension, it is insufficient to explain the entire process. Recently, research studies findings identified that textbase-level skills including reader's knowledge about grammatical structure within sentence (i.e. syntactic skill) and ability to order sentences into a coherent and linguistically connected picture out of the text (i.e. discourse skill), have significant effects to text comprehension beyond that of word reading. However, the role of higher-level processing and its relation to text comprehension has been under-explored. To this end, the current study examined the relation between EFs, linguistic skills and text comprehension. More specifically, the study has investigated the role of EF components, namely inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and working memory, in relation to text comprehension performance. In present study, one hundred and twenty-eight Chinese primary school children (Mage = 9.9, SDage = 1.98) were tested on their syntactic skill, discourse skill, working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and text comprehension. The data was analyzed using hierarchical multiple regression. The results showed that EF components were significant predictors to text comprehension after statistically controlling for age and linguistic skills. The components of EF explained approximately 13% of the variance in text comprehension performance after linguistic skills were statically controlling for. The study suggests the importance of EFs to text comprehension.