Children's understanding in reading and listening

Children's understanding was assessed after they read or listened to brief texts that described a scene, explained a sequence of events, or told a story. Data were obtained in a developmental study of 157 2nd-6th graders and in a study of 150 5th graders. The data indicate that effectiveness in understanding depends on the fluency with which component processes of perceptual recognition, comprehension, and memory are coordinated. The understanding of novice readers, who recognized a printed text accurately but laboriously, was poorer than their understanding of a comparable spoken text. In skilled readers, a similar loss of understanding occurred when accurate recognition was accomplished at a fast pace. When skilled readers listened to a text that they could simultaneously read, their understanding was better than when they read orally. These findings interacted with text content, some materials being associated with the findings concerning both loss and improvement of understanding and other materials being associated with neither. (29 ref)