The Role of Working Memory Deficits in Children with Poor Comprehension Ability

Children with poor reading comprehension ability show difficulties on a range of executive functioning tasks. Two groups of 10- to 11-year-olds, who were matched for chronological age, reading vocabulary and performance IQ, but who differed in comprehension skill, were selected. We have compared these two groups on a verbal and visual-spatial working memory tasks. Results indicated that poor comprehenders have less functional working memory capacity than their same age counterparts. We have also found differences between groups on the mean number of intrusion errors: poor comprehenders made more intrusion errors, suggesting the presence of a problem in the inhibition processes.