Using a Self-Paced Reading Task to Examine the Comprehension Monitoring Abilities of Children with and without ADHD
Abstract
The current study examined how children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) deployed their attention while reading and the cognitive processes thought to be related to successful comprehension. 42 children between 9 and 14 years of age read passages during a self-paced reading task. Half of the passages contained semantic inconsistencies. Of interest was the two groups of children’s subsequent comprehension and the extent that they noticed the inconsistencies. The children’s working memory, inferencing ability, verbal and non-verbal intelligence and decoding ability were also measured. Only the typically developing children’s reading times were impacted by the passages’ consistency. That is, the typically developing children spent longer reading the critical words in the inconsistent passages relative to the critical words in the consistent passages. Working memory, verbal and non-verbal intelligence, inferencing ability and decoding ability were all related to the children’s comprehension. The implications of these findings are discussed.