Effects Of Phonological Processing And Central Executive Function On Decoding,language Comprehension Of Children In Different Grades

Reading is a complex process including decoding,syntax processing,semantic analysis and language comprehension.Among them,decoding and language comprehension are two important components of reading comprehension.While up to now,few research has been devoted to directly explore the effects of phonological processing and central executive function on diverse reading comprehension components(decoding and language comprehension).In addition,the primary school stage is a period of development of children’s reading ability and cognitive ability.However,few research has focused on the developmental changes in the relationship of phonological processing,central executive function and reading comprehension among children of different grades.Therefore,the present study adopts within-subject design to examine the contribution of phonological processing and central executive function to the decoding and language comprehension of children in different grades.256 children(Grade 3-6)were recruited and administered a range of reading measures with Chinese Characters Reading Test,Chinese Word Reading Test and Pseudo-Word Reading Test are used to investigate the decoding skills and Listening Comprehension Test to exam language comprehension skills.Additionally,we investigated children’s phonological processing and performance of central executive function using the digital span,non-word span,GO/NOGO,Stroop task,digit updating(simple updating task and complex updating task)and digit shifting.The results showed that,after controlling for age and general cognitive ability,the digital span and simple updating accuracy significantly contributed to decoding skills,and both complex updating accuracy and shifting cost significantly predicted children’s language comprehension skills,respectively.A horizontal comparison was carried out to examine the extent to which decoding and language comprehension for children could be predicted by phonological processing and central executive function across different grades.The results indicated that,the prediction of phonological processing on decoding skills disappeared as children progress through school.The results still found a separation in the contribution of children’s decoding and language comprehension by the simple updating task and the complex updatingtask,respectively.Specifically,the performance of complex updating task only has a predictive effect on the reading ability in younger children,whereas there was a strong contribution of the simple updating task performance on the reading ability in older children.More importantly,we found that shifting had a relatively stable contribution to language comprehension skills across grade level.These findings support the idea that,phonological processing and central executive function have different effects on children’s decoding and language comprehension skills.Specifically,phonological processing was an unique predictor on children’s decoding ability,and different sub-components of central executive functions also have different contribute to decoding and language comprehension.Meanwhile,the role of phonological processing and central executive function in children’s decoding and language comprehension changed across grade level.The effect of phonological processing on decoding became weak,while central executive functions had a strong and positive contribution to language comprehension.