The relationship between individual differences in sentence reading, parsing and text comprehension in children

Individual differences (ID) children’s accuracy in establishing propositional sentence meaning from syntactic cues (parsing) when listening to or reading sentences has recently been shown to be as strong a predictor of ID’s in children’s text comprehension compared to well-established predictors such as decoding and vocabulary (e.g. Poulsen et al. 2016; 2022; Sorenson Duncan et al., 2021). But the pipeline from sentence reading to text comprehension is unclear. We investigated the effect of ID’s in decoding and auditory parsing on sentence reading speed and text comprehension. Method: 136 grade 6 students completed standardized tests of text comprehension, decoding, auditory parsing, and a parallel test of written parsing that also tracked sentence reading speed. Results: Sentence-level measures were strong correlates of text comprehension. Sentence reading speed was correlated with decoding efficiency, but not auditory parsing, suggesting that ID’s in parsing does not influence children’s reading speed. However, both were significant predictors in multiple regressions where written parsing accuracy appeared to function as a suppressor. Discussion: The results confirm the strong relationship between ID’s in parsing and text comprehension and indicated that ID’s in parsing did influence sentence reading speed, but that this is only visible when speed-accuracy trade-offs were taken into account.