A New Measure for Assessing the Contributions of Higher Level Processes to Language Comprehension Performance in Preschoolers

The present study reports the development of a theoretically motivated measure that provides estimates of a preschooler's ability to recall auditory text, to make text-based inferences, to access knowledge from long-term memory, and to integrate this accessed knowledge with new information from auditory text. This new preschooler component processes task is based on measures developed by Hannon and Daneman (2001) and August, Francis, Hsu, and Snow (2006), but it uses pictures and auditory text to make it more suitable for children 4-6 years of age. The results show that the new task is suitable for understanding the contributions of higher level processes to performance on a measure of language comprehension. In fact, it appears to be a better predictor of language comprehension performance than it is a measure of working memory. In addition, its medium-knowledge integration component is a good predictor of performance on a composite measure of fluid intelligence. Finally, a factor analysis reveals 3 separate clusters of abilities: word decoding skills, higher level processes associated with text-based processing, and higher level processes associated with accessing prior knowledge.