Comprehension Ability in Mature Readers

The ability to learn and execute the component processes of reading varies widely. Reading comprehension involves language specific processes as well as domain general cognitive abilities–sensation, perception, attention, memory, and reasoning. Variation in any of these abilities potentially underlies individual differences in comprehension performance. Thus, one important question concerns the extent to which variation in some ability is central to individual differences in comprehension performance and the extent to which variation in the ability is derivative. For example, researchers have found that poor comprehenders have more difficulty parsing complex syntactic structures than do good comprehenders. This chapter reviews five reader characteristics that are associated with comprehension ability in mature readers. Two criteria are used in selecting these particular characteristics from all of those that are potentially involved in comprehension. First, characteristics are selected that have the strongest correlations with comprehension performance. Second, characteristics are selected that play a central role in different theories of comprehension skill. The characteristics that selected are: word-level ability, working memory capacity, suppression ability, print exposure, and background knowledge.