ABSTRACT
Our previous work, and that of other researchers, has provided information about the skills and abilities that are associated with reading comprehension in children (for a summary, see Cain & Oakhill, 2004). To become a successful reader, a child must be able to decode the individual words on the page and must be able to comprehend the text. Word reading and reading comprehension are highly related skills: Correlations between them fall within the range of .30 to .77 (Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Yuill & Oakhill, 1991). When word reading and reading comprehension difficulties occur together, problems with understanding can arise, because labored decoding of words leaves the
reader with insufficient processing capacity to compute the relations between successive words, phrases, and sentences to construct a coherent and meaningful representation of the text (e.g., Perfetti, 1985).
