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Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 8, pp 1773–1788 | Cite as

From words to text: inference making mediates the role of vocabulary in children’s reading comprehension

  • Hanne Trebbien Daugaard
  • Kate Cain
  • Carsten Elbro
Article
First Online:

Abstract

We examined the relationship between inference making, vocabulary knowledge, and verbal working memory on children’s reading comprehension in 62 6th graders (aged 12). The effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension was predicted to be partly mediated by inference making for two reasons: Inference making often taps the semantic relations among words, and the precise word meanings in texts are selected by readers on the basis of context. All independent variables were significantly and moderately correlated with reading comprehension. In support of our prediction, the link between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension was significantly mediated by inference making even when verbal working memory was controlled. An alternative mediation hypothesis (vocabulary as a mediator of the effect of inference making on comprehension) was not supported by the data. The study replicates and extends the findings of earlier work (Cromley & Azevedo, 2007; Segers & Verhoeven, 2016; Ahmed et al., 2016).

Keywords

Reading comprehension Inference making Vocabulary Working memory 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This study was undertaken as part of the first author’s PhD project, which was embedded in the project Language and Cognition—Perspectives from Impairment (LaCPI) 2011–2014 at the University of Copenhagen, and the present paper was developed during a visit to the Department of Psychology at Lancaster University. LaCPI was supported by a grant to professor Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen from The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities, by The Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, and by The Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. The members of LaCPI also included postdoc Rikke Vang Christensen and eighteen students. We would like to thank all the members of LaCPI as well as the children, parents, and schools who participated in the study.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Hanne Trebbien Daugaard
    • 1
  • Kate Cain
    • 2
  • Carsten Elbro
    • 1
  1. 1.University of CopenhagenCopenhagenDenmark
  2. 2.Lancaster UniversityLancasterUK

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