Reading comprehension and executive attention deficits
Simone Loprete, Marcello Passarelli, Cinzia Modafferi, Paola Cresta, Federico Palmisani, Grazia Maria Santoro
The Conceptual span measures semantic working memory capacity, correlated with the performance of complex cognitive tasks, including reading comprehension. Several studies on subjects with executive deficits, such as ADHD, show a correlation between difficulties in reading comprehension and working memory capacity. In this paper we validated the Conceptual span on a sample of 8-10-year-old children. The adaptation has lower reliability (0.52) than the original validation, which is in line with other adaptations. The average estimate of capacity is 2.79, while the original validation estimated an average capacity of 3.4 (among undergraduate students). The relationship between the Conceptual span and reading comprehension is confirmed (r = 0.22, p = 0.003; when accounting for reading skills and digit span scores, r = 0.14, p = 0.023). The validation of the task on children opens up to the possibility of investigating the relationship between semantic working memory capacity and complex cognitive skills in novel contexts.
Keywords
Working memory capacity, Semantic memory, Conceptual span, Reading comprehension, Executive Functions.