ABSTRACT
What measures of comprehension are most likely to be sensitive to the development of reading comprehension of young children, including emergent and novice readers? Emergent readers are in the process of learning how to handle a text, developing print concepts, and acquiring knowledge about the grapheme-phoneme system. Emergent reading may incorporate comprehension-related competencies such as labeling illustrations, story-telling in response to illustrations, and memorization of text. Novice readers are able to read in more conventional ways than emergent readers with a refi ned knowledge of word recognition that incorporates alphabetics, the orthographic system, and a bank of high-frequency vocabulary. However, novice readers have not achieved automaticity in these domains. As a result, recent research indicates a stronger relationship between fl uency and comprehension for novice readers than for older readers in third and fourth grade (Paris, 2005; Paris, Carpenter, Paris, & Hamilton, 2005). Other developmental considerations in assessing the comprehension of young children include their lack of world experiences, vocabulary range, and attention spans.
