The importance of vocabulary in longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by word-level skills

Presented at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.
Prague, Czech Republic, 12–14 July 2007

Angeliki Mouzaki,1 Georgios Sideridis,1 Panagiotis Simos,1 & Athanassios Protopapas2
1University of Crete, Greece
2 Institute for Language & Speech Processing / Athena, Greece

Reading comprehension (RC) is related to word-level reading skills and print-independent language skills. Development of RC is expected to depend on development of such skills. We present data from a longitudinal study of 516 Greek children first assessed in spring of Grades 2, 3, and 4 and again one year later. RC at 2nd assessment was significantly predicted mainly by 1st assessment RC and vocabulary measures. Word-level reading predictors were substantially less important. After partialling out vocabulary, the small contribution from RC indicated that most of the longitudinally reliable RC variance can be attributed to lexical print-independent skills.