Word Processing of Children with Poor Reading Comprehension during an On-line Verbal Analogy Task

Objectives: Children with poor reading comprehension (poor comprehenders) show deficits in reading comprehension along with normal word decoding skills. Although their limited vocabulary knowledge has been reported, studies on the characteristics of their underlying semantic and phonological processing are limited. We investigated the word processing of Korean-speaking poor comprehenders using an online decision task during verbal analogy. Methods: The participants were 10 poor comprehenders and 12 typically developing children from grades 4th-6th. They performed the on-line decision tasks where verbal analogy questions of 'A:B= C:(?)' were presented on a computer screen. There were 3 types of target words: correct words, phonologically-related incorrect words, and semantically-related incorrect words. The children had to determine whether a target word was an appropriate answer for the preceding verbal analogy question. The reaction times and accuracies were measured. Results: For the correct words, the two groups did not significantly differ for both reaction times and accuracies. For the phonologically-related incorrect words, the poor comprehenders' reaction times were significantly slower than their peers, although the accuracies of the two groups were similar. For the semantically-related incorrect words, the poor comprehenders' performances were significantly less accurate and slower compared to their peers. Conclusion: These results indicated that poor comprehenders are inefficient in suppressing inappropriate but phonologically-or semantically-related words during word recognition. It is suggested that their deficits in reading comprehension may be partly associated with the inefficiency for inhibiting phonologically-similar words or contextually irrelevant meanings of words during reading comprehension.