Four Decades of Research into Children’s Reading Comprehension: A Personal Review

Children's Interpretations of Numerically Quantified Expression Ambiguities: Evidence from Quantified Noun Phrases and Bare Cardinals

Understanding how children comprehend text by forming links between sentences has been the focus of research for decades. Such research has consistently shown that children use anaphors and resolve ambiguities in a different manner than adults. The present study examined a less-studied anaphoric reference that arises when two numerically quantified expressions (e.g., "three cats… two cats…") are used in the text. Focusing on 249 six- to eight-year-old children and 50 adults for comparison, the study employed a picture selection task across six experiments to assess interpretative preferences in ambiguous and unambiguous discourses containing numerically quantified expressions. The findings indicate a pronounced difference in interpretative strategies: unlike adults, who predominantly adopted an anaphoric subset reading, children showed a consistent preference for the non-anaphoric reading, even in contexts explicitly disambiguated towards this interpretation. This preference persisted across various experimental manipulations, highlighting challenges in text integration and comprehension among children. Contributing to the developmental trajectory of language comprehension, this study underscores the complexity of cognitive development and linguistic interpretation, revealing significant developmental differences in processing numerically quantified expressions and anaphoric references within discourse.

The role of linguistic and cognitive skills in reading Chinese as a second language: A path analysis modeling approach

This study examined the role of basic linguistic skills (vocabulary, syntax, orthography, and morphological awareness), basic cognitive skills (working memory), and higher-order cognitive skills (inference making and reading monitoring) in reading Chinese as a second language (L2). A total of 252 international students from Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Laos were recruited, and a range of measures including a Chinese reading comprehension test (HSK level 3), four linguistic knowledge tests on Chinese lexical, syntactic, and orthographic knowledge as well as morphological awareness, a reading span test, an inference making task, and an inconsistency detection test. The results of hierarchical multiple regressions showed that the measured linguistic skills and cognitive skills explained 80% of the variances in L2 Chinese reading, among which morphological awareness made the largest contribution. The path analysis revealed that linguistic skills and working memory contributed indirectly to reading comprehension via inference making and comprehension monitoring, while the two higher-order cognitive skills made direct contributions. Overall, this study demonstrates that inference making and comprehension monitoring contributed directly to reading comprehension, while linguistic skills and working memory functioned indirectly via the higher-order cognitive skills It also highlights the importance of morphological awareness in a hierarchical model of L2 Chinese reading.

The Contributions of Language Skills and Comprehension Monitoring to Chinese Reading Comprehension: A Longitudinal Investigation

This study examined how vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and orthographic knowledge are related to comprehension monitoring and whether comprehension monitoring mediates the relations between these language skills and reading comprehension. Eighty-nine Chinese children were assessed on their vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, orthographic knowledge, and comprehension monitoring in Grade 1. Their reading comprehension skills were assessed in Grade 1 and Grade 3. Results showed that in Grade 1, comprehension monitoring mediated the relations between vocabulary and syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension. For Grade 3 reading comprehension, syntactic knowledge in Grade 1 was the only significant predictor. These findings indicate that multiple language skills make direct and indirect contributions via comprehension monitoring to Chinese reading comprehension, and the relations would change as children’s reading skills develop.