About the project
The ultimate goal of reading is to understanding written texts – to comprehend the content of the text and the authors meaning. In order to achieve this goal the reader has to integrate a number linguistic skills and cognitive processes. Various studies have addressed the importance of many of these cognitive and linguistic factors, but few of them have included several of the skills and processes simultaneously. Further, even less studies has examined whether the different cognitive and linguistic factors are able to uniquely explain the longitudinal development of reading comprehension. One part of the project incorporates several important predictors (e.g., decoding, grammar, inference, vocabulary, working memory) and uses a relatively large sample in exploring both the structure and the development of beginning reading comprehension skills. A second part of the project concerns how first and second language learners differ in their development of reading comprehension skills and how vocabulary and decoding skills are able to explaine these differences.