Letter updating is related to reading fluency but not comprehension

The aim of the current study was to investigate the relation between working memory updating and reading skills (i.e., reading fluency and comprehension) in a sample of typically-developing fourth and fifth-grade children. Updating requires maintenance of goal-relevant information and control of irrelevant details; most working memory updating tasks examine this function using materials involving semantic encoding. We administered an updating task that required shallow information encoding, together with general cognitive abilities tests and reading measures. We found that updating performance accounted for a specific portion of variation in reading fluency, but not comprehension. Overall, our results suggest a specific relation between reading fluency and WM updating modulated by the similarity of materials across tasks, and were discussed with reference to relevant literature in the field.