Does weak reading comprehension reflect an integration deficit?

Seven‐ and eight‐year‐old skilled and less‐skilled comprehenders were compared on a sentence recognition task in two conditions varying in memory load and retention interval. Integration of story information during comprehension was indexed by inflated recognition errors of foils that had been constructed by integrating information across original story sentences. Skilled comprehenders exhibited more accurate memory for sentences than less‐skilled comprehenders. However, the groups did not differ in the degree to which they integrated information with minimal memory demand, or in their tendency to integrate information and retain the integrated representations with increased memory demand. These results were interpreted as evidence that integration deficits do not lie at the root of reading comprehension difficulties in mainstream children.