HESS, THOMAS M., and RADTKE, ROBERT C. Processing and Memory Factors in Children's Reading Comprehension Skill. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 479-488. The roles of verbal coding skills, processing efficiency, and memory ability in accounting for individual and developmental differences in reading comprehension skill were examined. Measures of automatic processing of phonological information, name retrieval, reading time, memory scanning efficiency, memory span for letter strings of high and low approximation to English, and story recall were obtained for children in grades 3-8. Regression and multivariate statistical methods were used to examine the influence of these measures on skill within a theoretical model of comprehension. Initial analyses indicated that semantic coding skills, scanning speed of working memory contents, and span low all accounted for significant skill variance. Further multivariate analyses suggested that coding and scanning speed were related to general processing efficiency and that some general memory ability factor, which differed across skill levels, was affecting performance on all 3 memory tasks. These results indicate that skill differences can arise through ability differences at 2 independent levels-processing speed and memoryand that general factors might be more important predictors of skill than specific operations.
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