The Role of Comprehension Monitoring,

Theory of Mind, and Vocabulary Depth

in Predicting Story Comprehension
and Recall of Kindergarten Children
Katherine Strasser

ABSTR ACT

Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile,

Santiago

Recent studies have revealed that preschoolers story comprehension is influenced by several basic as well as complex cognitive and linguistic processes.
Among the abilities known to be relevant for young childrens understanding
of stories are the size of their vocabulary, their inference-making ability, and
their working memory. In this study, we examine the role of other processes
in explaining preschool childrens story comprehension, in a sample of 257
Chilean kindergarten children from middle-income families. The processes
we examine are comprehension monitoring, theory of mind, inhibition, and
attention control. Mediation relations suggested by theory and previous research are examined between working memory and comprehension, through
integrative processes, and between vocabulary breadth and comprehension,
through vocabulary depth. We use two different measures of story comprehension to clarify the role that each predictor plays in different aspects
of this complex skill. Results suggest that when the story comprehension
measure requires construction of a coherent representation, vocabulary,
monitoring, inferences, working memory, inhibitory skill, and attention, but
not theory of mind, make a significant contribution. Effects of vocabulary
breadth are mediated by vocabulary depth, and effects of working memory
are partially mediated by monitoring and inferences. When story comprehension is measured through recall of isolated story elements, only working
memory and vocabulary explain significant variance. Theoretical as well as
practical implications are discussed.

Francisca del Ro
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago,
Chile

Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

pp. 119 | doi:10.1002/rrq.68
2013 International Reading Association

omprehension of connected discourse such as that found in

narratives or informational text is essential for school success
as well as many daily activities. Learning from, as well as communicating with, other human beings rests on our ability to connect
ideas and sentences to construct coherent global representations. The
role that knowledge and cognitive and linguistic processes play in
such constructions has been thoroughly investigated in different discourse modalities, leading to an understanding of the importance of
basic cognitive processes, such as working memory and attention control (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Florit, Roch, Altoe, & Levorato,
2009; Florit, Roch, & Levorato, 2011; Hannon & Daneman, 2001),
knowledge integration abilities such as inference making (Cain,
Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001; Florit etal., 2009, 2011; Hannon &
Frias, 2012 ; Lepola, Lynch, Laakkonen, Silvn, & Niemi, 2012 ;
Tompkins, Guo, & Justice, 2013), and comprehension monitoring
(Oakhill & Cain, 2012; Oakhill, Cain, & Bryant, 2003; Oakhill, Hartt,
& Samols, 2005); and knowledge-based processes, such as vocabulary
breadth and depth (Cain & Oakhill, 2006; Nation & Snowling, 2004;
Ouellette, 2006).

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Several of these processes have been shown to be important for discourse comprehension across modalities
(e.g., listening to or reading stories, watching movies,
engaging with wordless books) and ages. Specifically,
there is evidence that inference-making ability, vocabulary, and working memory play similar roles in the comprehension of written and listening comprehension of
readers as well as preschool children who are not yet able
to read (Cain etal., 2001; Florit etal., 2009, 2011; Hannon
& Frias, 2012; Lepola etal., 2012; Tompkins etal., 2013).
There are, however, some processesnamely, vocabulary depth and comprehension monitoringwhose role
on discourse comprehension has been examined only in
the context of written discourse and, therefore, only with
schoolchildren or adults. Yet, other processes have been
hypothesized to have an impact on discourse comprehension, but little empirical evidence has been collected
to date to support those hypotheses; such is the case of
theory of mind and two executive function components:
inhibitory control and attention control.
In the present study, we seek to examine and understand the role of these processes in the discourse comprehension of preschool children. This examination
includes estimating their impact on comprehension and
testing mediation mechanisms that may explain their
effects. Specifically, we test whether vocabulary depth
mediates the role of vocabulary breadth and whether
the effect of working memory is mediated by other,
more complex processes, such as comprehension monitoring, inferencing, and theory of mind.
In preschool and school-age children, discourse
comprehension has been studied mainly in the context
of the narrative genre. Therefore, this study focuses on
story comprehension, although most of the processes
discussed here can be expected to apply to other genres,
such as informative discourse (with the notable exception of theory of mind, which is probably only relevant
for comprehension of stories). We understand story
comprehension as a group of interrelated skills that allow the person to build a coherent representation of a
story (Kendeou etal., 2005; Lynch etal., 2008). The two
measures of story comprehension in this study are a
wordless-book task and a story recall task. Both types of
methods have been previously used as measures of story
comprehension (Paris & Paris, 2003). The wordlessbook task requires children to construct a coherent representation of the story and use it to answer questions
about causes, consequences, goals, desires, and emotions. The story recall task requires retrieval of literal
information in the form of isolated story elements.
Comparing the predictive value of cognitive and linguistic processes for these two measures may contribute
to our understanding of the role that different skills
play in different aspects of story comprehension and
recall.

2 | Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

Understanding the role played by different processes in young childrens comprehension and recall of
discourse is essential for developing effective interventions both in preschool and school settings, given the
importance that discourse comprehension has for later
reading achievement. Language comprehension is often
overlooked in early instruction (Kendeou etal., 2005;
van Kleeck, 2008), especially in developing countries
such as Chile, where scientific research on learning processes has only recently made its way into classrooms.
Both national and international assessments show that
Chilean students, although they reach reading fluency
fairly easily, tend to fail on comprehension assessments,
especially on those requiring the integration of information to infer implicit information and solve problems
(Gobierno de Chile, 2010 ; OECD, 2012a). We expect
this study to contribute to our understanding of the role
that those kinds of processes play in influencing discourse comprehension in preschoolers, therefore
strengthening our ability to design early interventions
to increase childrens ability to deal with complex discourses at different ages.
In what follows, we review the current knowledge
about the oral language and cognitive ability components of discourse comprehension in different modalities: movies, written text, wordless books, picture
books, and listening. Theory and evidence both suggest
that the processes that explain discourse comprehension are similar across modalities (Kendeou, BohnGettler, White, & van den Broek, 2008; Lynch etal.,
2008; Tompkins etal., 2013), so we draw on all kinds of
discourse comprehension studies to construct a picture
of what matters when trying to form a coherent representation of language that goes beyond the sentence.

Inference-Making Ability
Inferring implicit knowledge is essential for forming a
coherent representation of a story. For example, consider the sentences Pedro forgot his umbrella and
Pedro was wet. To connect the two sentences, one
needs to infer that it was raining. This inference links
both sentences and gives meaning to the text (van
Kleeck, 2008; van Kleeck, Vander Woude, & Hammett,
2006), turning it into a coherent whole. Without these
kinds of inferences, stories become a list of unrelated
events (van den Broek etal., 2005).
Among inferences, causal ones are probably most
important for understanding. Cain and Oakhill (Cain,
2003; Cain & Oakhill, 1999; Oakhill, 1982; Oakhill &
Cain, 2012) have shown that children who are prone to
making causal connections tend to perform better on
standardized reading comprehension tests, even after
taking into account the effect of literal recall and

previous knowledge (Cain et al., 2004). Children as

young as 4years old have been shown to be able to make
inferences in narrative contexts (Kendeou etal., 2008;
Tompkins etal., 2013; Wenner, 2004), and their tendency to make inferences predicts their concurrent
story comprehension as well as their later reading comprehension (Cain etal., 2001; Florit etal., 2011; Hannon
& Frias, 2012; Kendeou etal., 2008; Lepola etal., 2012;
Tompkins etal., 2013). There is also some evidence suggesting that training focused on inferences can improve
preschool childrens listening comprehension of stories
(Bianco etal., 2010 ; Strasser, Larran, & Lissi, 2013).
Because it has already been proven to be an important
predictor of story comprehension in preschoolers, we
include inferences in our model to account for this
variance.

Comprehension Monitoring
Strategic knowledge allows the effective deployment of
resources to process parts of the text that are especially
relevant or troublesome. Strategic knowledge is a key
factor of discourse comprehension in schoolchildren
and adults (Andreassen & Brten, 2010 ; Dermitzaki,
Andreou, & Paraskeva, 2008; Eason, Goldberg, Young,
Geist, & Cutting, 2012; Koli-Vehovec & Bajanski,
2006; Palincsar & Brown, 1984), but we are not sure if it
plays a role in preschool childrens comprehension due
to developmental constraints on metacognition.
However, whereas preschoolers may not be able to
apply strategic knowledge in a planned way to improve
their understanding, they are at least able to monitor
their comprehension, detecting and naming inconsistencies in stories (Skarakis-Doyle, 2002; Skarakis-Doyle
& Dempsey, 2008; Skarakis-Doyle, Dempsey, & Lee,
2008). This monitoring of ones comprehension is key to
the future use of metacognitive strategies because it signals the need to apply them. Monitoring is, indeed, associated with comprehension in schoolchildren (Cain
etal., 2004; Fleisher, 1990; Garner & Reis, 1981; Oakhill
& Cain, 2012 ; Oakhill et al., 2003, 2005 ; Tunmer,
Herriman, & Nesdale, 1988), but its role in the comprehension of younger children has not been tested.

Vocabulary: Breadth and Depth

One of the language abilities most strongly related to
comprehension at all ages is the size of a persons lexicon (Florit etal., 2009, 2011; Nation & Snowling, 2004;
Protopapas, Sideridis, Mouzaki, & Simos, 2007;
Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2008). This is in part explained by vocabulary being, among other things, an
indicator of world knowledge (Stahl, 2003; Stahl &

Fairbanks, 1986), which is in turn essential for making

inferences (Ackerman, Silver, & Glickman, 1990; Cain
etal., 2001; Calvo, 2005). For example, in the text The
paleontologist packed the vertebra to take to his workplace, the inference that the paleontologist was in an
outdoor location, such as a mountain, requires knowing
the word paleontologist, but it mostly requires knowledge about the field of paleontology, such as knowing
the kinds of activities, people, elements, and places usually involved in it.
Vocabulary is usually measured with receptive tests
that require the subject to choose the picture corresponding to a word, such as the Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test. These assessments capture the most
basic level of word knowledge because it may be enough
to have only a vague idea about a word s meaning to
point to the right picture. Knowledge of words has different levels, however, from merely having heard a word
once or twice to being able to define it and use it appropriately (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002). Recent studies and theories suggest that the quality of a persons
lexicon is more important for language comprehension
than the number of words known (Ouellette, 2006 ;
Perfetti, 2007).
Perfetti s (2007) lexical quality theory explains that
beyond lexical breadth, good lexical qualitydefined as
high precision and flexibility in the representation of
wordsfavors comprehension in several ways: It facilitates the recovery of word meanings, helps resolve ambiguities, reduces cognitive load, and facilitates the
integration of individual words with the global representation of the text. Ouellette (2006; Ouellette & Beers,
2010) has used the term vocabulary depth to refer to the
level of word knowledge shown by a person. In his research, Ouellette (2006) has measured depth by individuals ability to give a complete definition and has
found that this ability contributed unique variance to
fourth graders reading comprehension after controlling for vocabulary breadth, age, nonverbal IQ, decoding, and visual word recognition.
Additionally, other studies that include both a receptive vocabulary measure and a definitions measure
as predictors of comprehension have found stronger effects of the latter (Snow, Tabors, Nicholson, & Kurland,
1995). Similarly, Florit and her colleagues (2009, 2011)
found that in preschool children who are not yet able to
read, semantic tasks, such as giving definitions and understanding analogies, account for significant variance
of story comprehension, after controlling for vocabulary size. Working with a Spanish-language sample of
4-year-olds from low-income families, Strasser, del Ro,
and Larran (2013) also found significant unique effects
of both depth and breadth on listening story comprehension, although not a large difference between the
contribution of each of these variables.

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Ouellette (2006) proposes that lexical precision contributes to comprehension both by enabling faster and
more accurate decoding and by allowing for more semantic content to be brought to bear on the comprehension processes. We propose that the interplay
between breadth and depth may be explained by a mediation phenomenon, where vocabulary size exerts its
influence on comprehension through its effect on the
child s ability to develop a more sophisticated understanding of certain words, which in turn would contribute to greater understanding. In this study, we explore
this potential mediation effect.

Executive Functions
The concept of executive functions is used to describe
cognitive control functions used when facing novel
tasks in which it is necessary to concentrate, think, and
exert effort to avoid acting on ones initial impulses
(Diamond & Lee, 2011). Three processes are frequently
cited among the executive functions: inhibition of dominant responses, attention control, and working memory (Diamond & Lee, 2011).

Working Memory
In studies with individuals of different ages and across
discourse modalities, working memory is a reliable predictor of story comprehension even after controlling for
oral language in conventional readers (Andreassen &
Brten, 2010; Berninger etal., 2010; De Beni & Palladino,
2000 ; Hannon, 2012; Seigneuric, Ehrlich, Oakhill, &
Yuill, 2000; Swanson & Howell, 2001) and in preschool
children (Florit etal., 2009, 2011).
Nation, Adams, Bowyer- Crane, and Snowling
(1999) hypothesized a noncausal role of working memory in explaining reading comprehension. In this account, the observed correlation between working
memory and comprehension is explained by a third
variable, semantic skills, that influences both working
memory and reading comprehension. However, studies
that control for semantic ability have not been able to
eliminate the direct significant effect of working memory on reading comprehension, always finding both indirect and direct effects of the former on the latter (Cain
etal., 2004; Hannon, 2012).
Hannon (2012) proposed a model where working
memory permits the integration of knowledge (both
within text and between text and extratextual knowledge). In this model, the effect of working memory is
expected to be mediated wholly or partially by processes
that accomplish integration, such as inference making.
In support of this model, Daneman and Hannon (2007;
Hannon & Daneman, 2001) found that the influence of
working memory on listening comprehension was mediated by integrative processes (represented by different

4 | Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

kinds of inferences), whereas Hannon found both a direct effect of working memory and an indirect effect
through integrative processes. Thus, it seems that although working memory and integrative processes
share some variance, both make a unique and independent contribution to comprehension.
In the present study, we test whether these findings
hold in a younger population. Small children, because of
their limited working memory capacity, may have a very
difficult time with processes that require the integration
of knowledge from the text and from the world, which
casts doubt on the transferability to preschool children
of results about the role of working memory in older
children. In Hannon and Danemans (2001; Daneman &
Hannon, 2007) studies, integrative processes are represented by different kinds of inferences that link information from different parts of the text, as well as
information from the text with world knowledge. In the
present study, we consider three processes that may be
considered integrative, insofar as they require the connection of information not explicitly linked in the text,
to extract new information: inferences, comprehension
monitoring, and theory of mind. We therefore test the
direct and indirect effects of working memory on comprehension through these integrative processes.

Inhibitory Control
Inhibitory control is a persons ability to inhibit a strong
response in favor of a weaker, more appropriate one
(Diamond & Lee, 2011). There is very little research on
the relation of this ability to discourse comprehension
in any modality. Cain (2006) found that poor comprehenders show deficits in this skill compared with good
comprehenders at ages 9 and 10. In preschoolers,
McClelland and colleagues (2007) found that inhibitory
control in kindergarten was significantly related with
emergent literacy and vocabulary measured later in the
year. De Beni, Palladino, Pazzaglia, and Cornoldi (1998,
as cited in Cain, 2006) propose that the integration of
story elements while we read or listen requires not only
paying attention to relevant intra- and extratextual information but also eliminating irrelevant information
as we proceed through the text. The ability to inhibit
attention to attractive but irrelevant details and focus
on more central but less noticeable elements may lead
good comprehenders to have more resources available
for discourse processing.

Attention Control
Attention control refers to ones ability to focus attention
on the relevant stimuli to solve a task, including the ability to shift attention from one stimulus to another as
needed (Blair & Diamond, 2008). Story comprehension
requires attention to relevant elements and relations to

construct a representation. Blair and Razza (2007) found

that attention control contributes unique variance to the
prediction of emergent literacy measures in kindergarten, and Sesma, Mahone, Levine, Eason, and Cutting
(2009) showed that attentional problems and planning
ability, measured independently, had an additional contribution to comprehension after controlling for working memory and other skills.

Theory of Mind
The concept of theory of mind refers to peoples understanding of their own and others mental states, specifically beliefs and desires. Most of the research on
theory of mind has been conducted with children between the ages of 3 and 6, regarding at what age they
understand what other people think and want and
whether they understand how those thoughts and wants
can be either correct or mistaken. This kind of understanding is important for comprehending stories.
In the narrative genre, most coherence relations are
based on the characters mental states (Lynch & van den
Broek, 2007). This is not equally true of other kinds of
discourse, such as expository text, where coherence relations are mostly mechanical. Although inference-making
ability would affect both kinds of inferencesabout psychological and physical relationsinferences that require
an understanding of characters inner states may be additionally influenced by childrens theory of mind.
Indeed, several authors have found that childrens sensitivity to psychological elements is directly related to their
story comprehension (Cain, 2003; Makdissi &Boisclair,
2006; Trabasso & Wiley, 2005; Wenner, 2004). Strasser,
Larran, and Lissi (2013) found that a storybook reading
intervention based on asking questions and making comments about mental states during group readings had a
positive effect on childrens comprehension of the story,
compared with a similar intervention based on dialogic
reading techniques that did not focus on mental states.
In addition, it has been found that persons with an
autistic spectrum disorder, who exhibit poor theory of
mind skills, tend to present specific reading comprehension deficits (Kaland etal., 2005; Nation, Clarke,
Wright, & Williams, 2006; Nation & Norbury, 2005;
Ricketts, Jones, Happ, & Charman, 2013; Saldaa,
2008), lending support to a possible relation between
theory of mind and comprehension of narrative discourse. However, research suggests that a great deal of
childrens theory of mind is influenced by their linguistic proficiency (Ford & Milosky, 2008 ; Milligan,
Astington, & Dack, 2007), and thus it is possible that all
the effects of theory of mind on story comprehension is
explained by childrens language skills and their general
inferencing abilities.

Here we examine whether theory of mind contributes additional variance to the explanation of story
comprehension after accounting for language variables
and general inference-making abilities.

Goals and Hypotheses

The goal of this study was to examine and compare the
contribution of inferences, comprehension monitoring,
theory of mind, vocabulary, working memory, inhibitory control, and attention control to the explanation of
two measures of story comprehension in kindergarten
children and to examine mediation effects among these
variables. Specifically, the study seeks to contrast four
hypotheses:
1. Story comprehension measured by a wordlessbook task and a story recall task will be explained
by a different array of predictors; specifically, the
wordless-book task will be explained by integrative processes and story recall better explained by
the executive functions because only the former
task requires the integration of information to
construct a coherent representation, whereas the
latter relies more heavily on literal recall of isolated
elements.
2. Given their role in discourse comprehension in
older populations, and the fact that they have been
shown to exhibit variability in preschoolers, comprehension monitoring and theory of mind are
expected to explain additional variance in story
comprehension, after accounting for executive
functions, inference-making ability, and vocabulary breadth, which have already been shown to be
important for predicting story comprehension.
3. The contribution of vocabulary breadth on story
comprehension is expected to be mediated by vocabulary depth, given previous findings of stronger
effects of the latter, as well as theories such as
Perfettis (2007) that imply that quality of lexical representations is the key factor for comprehension.
4. The contribution of working memory to story comprehension is mediated by integrative processes
(which in this study include inference making,
comprehension monitoring, and theory of mind),
as shown by Daneman and Hannon (2007; Hannon
&Daneman, 2001) with older populations.

Method
Participants
The participants were 257 kindergarten children between the ages of 53 and 82months (108 female; mean

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age at the beginning of the study = 66.55months, standard deviation [SD] =4.05months) recruited from eight
schools in the Santiago metropolitan area of Chile. The
Chilean Ministry of Education classifies schools into
five socioeconomic status groups, depending on the average income and education of the parents. Seven of the
schools in the sample belonged to group C (middle),
with an average family monthly income equivalent to
about US$1,000 and average parental education of
12years (SD =1year) in 2010. The eighth school belongs to group D (middle-high), with an average family
monthly income equivalent to about US$1,360 and average parental education of 14 years (SD = 1 year).
Family income was calculated by adding the income for
all members of the family and does not include any government subsidies or assistance.
Although the high average parental education may
seem discrepant with the low family incomes for the
standards of a developed country, these are typical
numbers for Chile (Secretara Ministerial Regional de
Desarrollo Social Regin Metropolitana, 2012) for several reasons. First, Chile has a high educational attainment level compared with the rest of the region (OECD,
2012a). Second, the families in our study do not belong
to the lowest income groups in the country. Rather,
these families income corresponds approximately to
the third- and fourth-income quintiles (the income
quintiles are calculated based on per capita income,
whereas the school income is an average of family income, so this is only an estimate), so their high levels of
education are unsurprising. It is key to remember, however, that 12 or 14years of educational attainment in
Chile may not mean the same in terms of verbal competence and intellectual skill as 12years of education in a
developed country because of the low quality of Chilean
public education (OECD, 2012a).
The two socioeconomic status categories included
in the study (C and D) represent 21% and 10% of
schools in Chile, respectively. The reason we chose this
segment to draw our sample from responds to findings
from our previous experience with testing in schools
from the A and B socioeconomic groups, where there is
a fairly high percentage of children with developmental
and linguistic delays, and we found that children often
had trouble with understanding and following directions. Although we believe it is important to do research that is generalizable to different sectors of the
Chilean population, we also think that this specific
study should first be conducted with children of a
lower developmental risk because of the novelty of
some of its instruments and hypotheses. Therefore, we
chose middle-income groups to avoid increasing measurement error because of language and general developmental problems found in the lowest income
samples.

6 | Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

Schools were contacted by phone and invited to participate in the study. Parents were informed about the
study during parentteacher conferences and were asked
to sign a consent form if they agreed to let their child
participate. We handed out 535 consent forms and received consent for 410 children, 257 of which completed
all the evaluations and were included in this study.
Children with parental consent who were not included in the study correspond to one of three cases:
Some were used in the piloting of the novel instruments
and, therefore, could not be included in the study. Other
children were not included because we could not evaluate all available children in a given school for logistic
reasons. For example, some schools offered only one
room and a two-hour window for testing, so even if
there were 90 children with parental consent in that
school, we could not test them all in the available time
frame. Finally, some children received a subset of the
measures but could not receive the remaining measures
because of repeated absences.

Measures
Story Comprehension
(Dependent Measure)
Story comprehension was measured with the wordless
picture book Chigiro encuentra ayuda [Capybara Finds
Help] by Ivar Da Coll (2006). This short, 18-page book
portrays the attempts of a capybara to reach some bananas in a tree. An instrument to measure story comprehension in 4- and 5-year-old children had previously
been developed using this book, which showed good reliability as well as concurrent and discriminant validity in
that age range (Strasser, Larran, Lpez de Lrida, & Lissi,
2010). In that study, childrens scores on this instrument
were correlated positively and significantly with measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary and with
comprehension of three storybooks that were read repeatedly to the children. The data showed that the influence of vocabulary was weaker for the wordless-book
task than for the questions based on storybooks that had
been read to the children previously, showing that the
wordless-book instrument is less influenced by previous
knowledge and knowledge of specific words. Also, longitudinal data in the study showed that the scores increased
over a six-month period, suggesting that the instrument
was sensitive to changes in this ability with age.
For the present study, we adapted the instrument to
kindergarten children by increasing the difficulty of the
questions but preserved the original procedure, which
is as follows: The examiner shows the book to the child
and asks the child to name the main character.
(Capybaras are not well known in Chile, so children
were given the opportunity to name the animal and
were allowed to use that name throughout the task; the

most common names were bear, mouse, and monkey.)

Once the child had named the animal, the first page
was shown, and the examiner said, Here is [the animal], and here are some bananas, thus ensuring that all
children saw the two elements but without providing
any plot cues. Then, children were told to look at all the
pictures carefully because they would be asked some
questions later. Children were encouraged to talk during the picture walk to ensure that they were paying attention, but these verbalizations were not recorded or
coded. After the picture walk, children were asked 16
open- ended questions. Some of the questions were
asked while showing the child a specific picture (e.g.,
What is happening here?). Questions required the
child to infer goals, thoughts, feelings, and dialogue to
make causal inferences, predictions, and elaborative inferences. There was also one question about characters
and three questions that required the child to tell what
happens in the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
Childrens answers were written down and later coded
by two independent trained coders. Inter-rater agreement
was tested using Cohens Kappa coefficients in three
rounds of double-coding. In the third round, consisting
of 20 cases, coders achieved Cohens Kappa coefficients
higher than .9 for 15 questions and .78 for the remaining
question. All cases, including previously coded ones, were
recoded by one coder after achieving this level of agreement. Internal consistency (Cronbachs ) was .65 for the
complete test, calculated from the scores of all children
who received the instrument in this study.

Story Recall (Dependent Measure)

The second measure of story comprehension was the
story recall subscale of the Batera III WoodcockMuoz
(Muoz-Sandoval, Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather,
2005), which is the Spanish-language version of the
WoodcockJohnson III. This battery was developed
and tested with a sample of native Spanish speakers
from several Latin American countries, although Chile
is not one of them.
In this test, children listen to stories of increasing
length and are asked to tell me the story immediately
after hearing each one. Children receive 1point for every
element of the story recalled. The stories produced by the
child are scored on the spot by the examiner, so the scoring is by necessity quite simple and linked to literal information. This measure is conceptualized by its developers
as a measure of meaningful memory because it requires
recalling units that are presented in an organized way.
Confirmatory factor analyses reported by the publisher cluster this scale with other language comprehension tests in the battery, such as vocabulary, oral
comprehension, and text comprehension. Reported reliability (with the sample used for development) of this
scale is approximately .77 for this age range

(Muoz-Sandoval etal., 2005). In our sample, internal

consistency of the 10 stories reached .872 (Cronbach s
). No Chilean population norms exist for this measure,
so raw scores were used, and ages of children and days
in school were entered as controls in all analyses.

Vocabulary
In this study, we measured both breadth and depth of
vocabulary.

Vocabulary Breadth
To measure the breadth (size) of childrens receptive vocabulary, we used the Spanish-language version of the
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Test de Vocabulario
en Imgenes de Peabody), tested with a sample of nativelanguage speakers from several Latin American countries (not including Chile). In this test, children are
shown four illustrations and have to point to the one
that represents the word uttered by the examiner.
Reported internal consistency on this instrument is .93
for this age range (Spearman-Brown testretest formula). No Chilean norms exist for this measure, so raw
scores were used, and ages of children and days in
school were used as controls in all analyses.
Vocabulary Depth
To measure the depth of childrens lexicon, we used the
Spanish version of the vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler
Preschool and Primary Intelligence Scale, tested with a
sample of native Spanish-language speakers from Spain.
This subtest requires the child to offer definitions of a
list of words, and the definitions receive a score of 0, 1, or
2 according to their formal quality and the quantity of
information provided. The reported reliability of the
two subtests is .87 for vocabulary and .84 for analogies
in this age range (Spearman-Brown testretest formula).
No current Chilean norms exist for this measure, so raw
scores were used and ages of children and days in school
were used as controls in all analyses.

Executive Function
Three subcomponents of executive function were evaluated: inhibitory control, attention control, and working memory.

Inhibitory Control
Inhibition was assessed through the pencil-tapping task
(Diamond & Taylor, 1996). In this task, the child is instructed to tap once when the experimenter taps twice,
and vice versa. The task has 16 trials, and internal consistency in our study was .81 (Cronbach s ).
Attention Control
Attention was assessed with a checklist that the examiners completed after the administration of the story

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comprehension measure. The checklist was adapted

from one of the checklists included in the Leiter
International Performance ScaleRevised (Roid &
Miller, 1997). The adapted checklist included five behavior dimensions, each scored on a scale of 14, depending on the behavior. Higher scores represent better
attention control. The dimensions are pays attention to
instructions and demonstrations, intends to give the
correct answers, keeps concentration in repetitive tasks,
cooperates with examiners requests, and responds
promptly. The scale has a maximum of 20 points and a
minimum of 5. Internal consistency of the scale in our
study was .84 (Cronbach s ).

Working Memory
Working memory was measured using a composite of
the backward digits span and word span tasks of
Pickering, Baqus, and Gathercoles (1999) working
memory battery, developed with children from Spain as
a Spanish adaptation of Pickering and Gathercoles
(2001) working memory battery. The backward digits
span task is conceptualized as a measure of the central
executive, and the word span task as a measure of the
phonological loop. Previously reported internal consistency for this age range is .71 for the backward digits
span task and .81 for the word span task in Spanish
samples. Both measures were standardized and added
to form a single working memory scale.
Confirmatory factor analysis did not support a unitary executive function construct composed by the
three instruments. Furthermore, intercorrelations between the total scores of the four measures were low (see
Table1). Therefore, we analyzed them separately.

Comprehension Monitoring
Childrens ability to monitor their own comprehension
while listening to a story was measured with a task
adapted from Skarakis-Doyle etal.s (2008) study. We
created a short story with 12 internal inconsistencies
(e.g., actions not consistent with feelings, feelings not
consistent with events, actions not consistent with
world knowledge). Children were told that the story that
they were about to hear contained some errors and that
they should stop the reader whenever they heard something that did not sound right.
Examiners were trained to recognize verbal and
nonverbal signals of detection and to question children
when they identified one of these signs: Did I say something strange? What was it? Why is it strange? Any
verbalization that indicated that the child had captured
the actual inconsistency was granted a score of 1.
Verbalizations ranged from single words (Milk) to
elaborate explanations (If she wanted her parents to
think she was a big girl, she should not have spilled the

8 | Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

TABLE 1
Descriptive Statistics for All Measures in the Study
(n = 257)
Variable

Min

Max

Mean

Standard
deviation

Age in months

56

88

69.07

4.244

Days in school

93

270

162.77

39.147

Wordless-book task

8.00

32.00

25.012

4.149

Story recall task

59

22.54

15.434

Vocabulary breadth

86

58.35

12.952

Working memory
(e.g., function)
Inhibitory control
(e.g., function)

'3.94
1

4.85

0.000

1.605

16

14.43

2.763

Attention control
(e.g., function)

12.00

20.00

19.327

1.376

Inference making

0.00

20.00

12.669

3.226

Comprehension
monitoring

0.00

12.00

5.483

3.033

Vocabulary depth

2.00

39.00

16.848

7.939

Theory of mind

0.00

8.00

5.210

1.863

milk on purpose). Internal consistency of the 12 questions in our study was .78 (Cronbach s ). The scale had
a maximum score of 12 and a minimum score of 0.

Inference-Making Ability
Childrens ability to link two propositions to extract implicit information was measured with an adaptation of a
task developed by Oakhill (1982). In our task, children
heard 10 microstories consisting of two sentences each.
Each story allowed for one valid inference. For example,
for the story The little bear ate all of his breakfast. His
breakfast was honey, the valid inference is that the little
bear ate honey, whereas an invalid inference would be that
there was a lot of honey, because it does not follow from
the information available. After hearing the microstories,
children were read a list of test sentences and asked to indicate, for each sentence, whether the examiner said it.
For each story, there was one sentence that was originally
included in the story, one that was a valid inference, and
one that was an invalid inference. To avoid children using
their phonological loop to remember the stories, three
stories were read consecutively, and then the nine test sentences belonging to those stories were presented. Then,
the next three stories were read and so forth.
According to Oakhill s (1982) results, we assumed
that children who tend to connect two sentences to produce a bridging inference would tend to err by recognizing valid inferences that they never heard, but they

would tend to recognize original sentences correctly and

to reject sentences that were neither among the original
statements nor valid inferences. Thus, the inference score
was constructed by the sum of the memory score (number of original sentences recognized correctly) and the
inference score (recognized valid inferences), minus the
incorrect score (number of incorrect sentences recognized that were not valid inferences). The internal consistency coefficients of the memory, inference, and incorrect
scales were .63, .63, and .85, respectively. The maximum
score was 20 (if the child recognized all original sentences and all valid inferences but no incorrect sentences), and the minimum score was 10 (if the child did
not recognize any original sentence or valid inference but
recognized all incorrect sentences).

Theory of Mind
Theory of mind was measured using a scale from
Wellman and Lius (2004) work plus one added item
from Hughes etal.s (2005) study to avoid possible ceiling effects due to the age of our participants. Wellman
and Liu describe seven tasks that are ordered in difficulty from age 3 to age 6. We chose a set of four tasks
that best discriminate among children of the age range
of our participants (contents false belief, explicit false
belief, beliefemotion, and realapparent emotion) and
added a fifth task presumed to be of higher difficulty
(second-order false belief task; Hughes etal., 2005). The
following are the five tasks used in the battery:
1. Contents false belief: After the child has seen that
a box contains pencils, the child has to guess
what a puppet would think was in it. One point is
assigned if the child correctly answers the target
question (What will the puppet think?) and a
reality question (What is in the box?).
2. Explicit false belief: The child has to predict where
someone will search for a toy after it has been
moved from one location to another, without the
character seeing it. One point is assigned if the
child correctly answers the search question
(Where will she look for her toy?) and a reality
question (Where is the toy?).
3. Beliefemotion: The child has to predict a puppets emotion upon receiving something believed
to be liked (a can of Coca-Cola that actually contains milk). One point is assigned if the child correctly answers the emotion question (How does
the puppet feel when he gets the can of CocaCola, happy or sad?) and a control question
(How does he feel after he drinks from the can,
happy or sad?).
4. Realapparent emotion: The child has to guess
how a character feels when those feelings are

contradictory with their appearance. One point is

assigned if the child answers the target feel question (How did he feel on the inside?) more negatively than the target look question (How did
he look on the outside?).
5. Second-order false belief: The child has to guess
what a character thinks about what another person thinks, in false-belief conditions. Two siblings hide a chocolate in one location, and the
brother later changes it without the sister looking. A first false-belief task is administered here,
with 1point assigned for both the correct belief
(Where does she think the chocolate is?) and
the reality question (Where did he put the chocolate?), for 2 points total. Later, the child is
shown that unbeknownst to the brother, the sister was looking when he changed the chocolate.
Two more points are assigned for the correct belief (Where does the brother think the sister will
look for the chocolate?) and the reality question
(Where is the chocolate?).
The maximum score is 8, and the minimum is 0.
Internal consistency of this scale in our study was .641.

Procedures
Principals were contacted about the study by phone, and
we later sent a letter explaining the goals and procedures.
Parents were informed about the study during a general
parentteacher meeting and asked to sign an informed
consent form. Children were evaluated by trained undergraduate and graduate psychology students, in an empty
room or office in their school. All examiners had taken at
least one course in psychological evaluation as part of
their major and were trained and then supervised in the
field by either the first or second author.
The instruments were administered in five sessions,
organized as follows:
Session 1: Theory of mind and Test de Vocabulario
en Imgenes de Peabody
Session 2: Working memory, pencil-tapping task,
and WoodcockMuoz story recall subscale
Session 3: Wordless-book task, WoodcockMuoz
lettersound identification scale, and attention
control checklist
Session 4: Phonological awareness and comprehension monitoring
Session 5: Wechsler Preschool and Primary
Intelligence Scale vocabulary and inferences subtests
Children received the sessions in this order, with a lapse
of one to four weeks between two sessions.

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Data collection was conducted between the third

and ninth month of the school year (in Chile, the school
year runs from March to December, so assessments were
administered between May and November). Because of
logistic constraints, assessment started at different times
in different schools, so there was a lag of up to six months
between the administration of the same session to children in different schools (i.e., a child in one school may
have received session 5 in August, whereas a child in another school may have received the same session in
November).
To account for these differences, and because none
of the measures have valid age norms for the Chilean
population that could compensate for these differences
in age, all regressions reported herein were preliminarily conducted with and without controlling for the days
of kindergarten and age of the child at the time of each
test. However, because results were found not to vary,
we did not include all ages and days in school at testing
in the final models. We did, however, include the ages
and days in school at the time of the story comprehension and recall assessments (dependent variables).

Analytical Strategy
Hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. Control variables (gender, age, days in school)

were introduced first. Variables assumed to have an indirect effect were introduced second (vocabulary breadth
and executive functions). Finally, we introduced variables conceptualized as mediators (inference-making
ability, comprehension monitoring, vocabulary depth,
and theory of mind). We conducted one separate hierarchical regression for each dependent variable (wordlessbook task and WoodcockMuoz story recall task).

Results
Table2 shows correlations between all measures in the
study. As expected, many correlations are moderate and
significant, particularly those between vocabulary measures, working memory, and complex processes.

Direct-Effects Models
First, we conducted two multiple regression analyses
with control variables, inhibition, attention, vocabulary
breadth, and working memory, to establish direct effects
of the latter two. Tables3 and 4 summarize these models
for the wordless-book and literal recall tasks, respectively. For performance on the wordless-book task, the
control variables (gender, age, and days in school) plus
vocabulary breadth and executive functions explain

TABLE 2
Correlations Between All Measures in the Study (n = 257)
Variable
1. Age in months
2. Days in school

.263**

.157*

.192**

3. Wordless-book
task
4. Story recall task
5. Vocabulary
breadth
6. Working
memory
7. Inhibitory
control
8. Attention
control
9. Inference
making
10. Comprehension
monitoring
11. Vocabulary
depth
12. Theory of mind
*p < .05. **p < .01.

10 | Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

11

12

.044

.233**

.155*

.101

'.023

.070

.076

.177**

.144*

.004

.077

.093

.071

.032

.050

'.102

.229**

.033

.285**

.246**

.250**

'.032

.177**

.231**

.233**

.315**

.179**

.200**

.319**

.044

.138*

.138*

.224**

.304**

.209**

.268**

.194**

.203**

.217**

.291**

.389**

.332**

.301**

.123*

.174**

.318**

.368**

.307**

.045

.149*

.159*

.232**

.212**

.065

.039

.038

.010

'.057

.049

'.061

.294**

.352**

.373**

10

15.9% of the variance: F7, 249=6.724, p=.000. In this

model, all three executive function variables and vocabulary breadth have a significant effect on story comprehension. Surprisingly, however, the effect of inhibitory
skill on comprehension is negative once we control for
the other variables in the model. For performance on the
WoodcockMuoz story recall task, the control variables plus vocabulary breadth and executive functions
explain 13.7% of the variance: F7,249=5.629, p=.000.
Only working memory significantly predicts recall of
story elements measured with the story recall task.
TABLE 3
Regression Analysis Predicting Wordless-Book Task
Performance, With Controls, Vocabulary Breadth, and
Executive Functions: Direct Effects Model (n = 257)
B

Standard
effect

R2

Days in
school

0.016

0.006

.148

2.426*

0.159

Age in
months

0.062

0.061

.064

1.022

Female

'0.054

0.500

'.006

'0.108

Vocabulary
breadth

0.054

0.020

.167

2.641**

Working
memory

0.547

0.163

.212

3.352**

Inhibition

'0.227

0.092

'.151

'2.462*

Attention

0.362

0.180

.120

2.007*

Variable

*p < .05. **p < .01.

TABLE 4
Regression Analysis Predicting WoodcockMuoz Story
Recall Task Performance, With Controls, Vocabulary
Breadth, and Executive Functions: Direct-Effects
Model (n = 257)

Mediation Tests
Next, we tested mediation of the effect of vocabulary
breadth through vocabulary depth. According to Baron
and Kenny (1986), for mediation to be possible, it is necessary that the dependent variable be significantly correlated with the independent variable and that the
mediator be significantly correlated with both.
Although the regression coefficient of vocabulary
breadth was not significant for predicting Woodcock
Muoz story recall, we conducted the mediation test
with both dependent variables for the sake of comparison between the two final models. Following Baron and
Kenny s study, we conducted a new regression with
both the independent variable and the mediator and
observed whether the effect of the independent variable
is reduced or eliminated.
Tables5 and 6 show results of these regressions with
vocabulary depth in addition to all other variables in the
previous models for the wordless-book task and the
WoodcockMuoz story recall task, respectively. For the
wordless-book task, adding vocabulary depth has a significant effect on wordless-book comprehension (=.215,
t=3.21, p=.001), which raises the explained variance to
19.3%: F8, 248=7.392, p=.000. This represents a 3.4% increase and is significant: F1, 248=10.312, p=.001. The coefficient for vocabulary breadth is no longer significant
after adding vocabulary depth, suggesting that the effect
of vocabulary breadth on comprehension of a wordless
book is mediated by depth, as we had hypothesized
(following Ouellette s, 2006 , findings for reading
TABLE 5
Regression Analysis Testing Mediation of
Vocabulary Depth Between Vocabulary Breadth and
Comprehension as Measured With the Wordless-Book
Task: Mediated Model (n = 257)
B

Standard
effect

R2

Days in
school

0.012

0.006

.112

1.829

0.193

Age in
months

0.060

0.060

.062

1.008

Variable

Standard
effect

Days in
school

'0.016

0.024

.041

'0.669

Age in
months

'0.073

0.230

'.020

'0.318

Female

0.008

0.492

.001

0.016

'2.909

'1.542

Vocabulary
breadth

0.021

.103

1.574

1.886

'.093

0.033

Female
Vocabulary
breadth

0.138

0.076

.116

1.804

Working
memory

0.410

0.166

.159

2.470*

Working
memory

2.848

0.615

.296

4.628**

Attention

0.403

0.177

.134

2.271*

'0.403

'1.158

'0.255

0.091

'.170

'2.805**

0.348

'.072

Inhibition

Inhibition

0.112

0.035

.215

3.211**

Attention

0.894

0.679

.080

1.316

Variable

**p < .01.

R2
0.137

Vocabulary
depth
*p < .05. **p < .01.

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TABLE 6
Regression Analysis Testing Mediation of
Vocabulary Depth Between Vocabulary Breadth and
Comprehension as Measured With the Woodcock
Muoz Story Recall Task: Mediated Model (n = 257)
B

Standard
effect

Days in
school

'0.031

0.024

'.080

'1.291

Age in
months

'0.081

0.225

'.022

'0.358

Female

'2.666

1.850

'.085

'1.441

Vocabulary
breadth

0.057

0.079

.048

0.730

Working
memory

2.312

Inhibition

1.054

0.668

.094

Attention

'0.513

0.343

'.092

0.438

0.131

.225

Variable

Vocabulary
depth

0.624

.240

TABLE 7
Regression Analysis Testing Mediation of Integrative
Processes Between Working Memory and
Comprehension as Measured With the Wordless-Book
Task: Mediated Model (n = 257)
B

Standard
effect

R2

Days in school

0.018

0.006

.166

2.754**

0.223

Age in months

0.058

0.060

.059

0.968

'0.205

0.490

'.024

'0.419

Vocabulary
breadth

0.031

0.021

.098

1.500

Working
memory

0.386

0.167

.149

2.314*

Inhibition

'0.262

0.091

'.174

'2.883**

1.579

Attention

0.377

0.176

.125

2.137*

'1.496

Inferences

0.201

0.077

.156

2.595**

Comprehension
monitoring

0.214

0.088

.157

2.445*

Theory of
mind

0.051

0.145

.023

0.348

R2
0.174

Variable

Female

3.703**

3.329**

**p < .01.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

comprehension). The Sobel test (Baron & Kenny, 1986)

reveals that the mediated effect is significant: z=4.71,
p=.000. In the case of the story recall measure, we conducted the same analysis and found that vocabulary
depth has a significant effect on story recall (=.225,
t=3.329, p=.001), raising the explained variance to 17.4%:
F8, 248=7.392, p=.000. This represents a 3.7% increase and
is significant: F1, 248=11.080, p=.001. Mediation is not an
issue because vocabulary breadth was not significantly
related to the outcome in the first model.
The next step was to test the independent contribution of comprehension monitoring, inferences, and theory of mind, as well as the mediation hypothesis that
states that these integrative processes mediate the effect of
working memory on story comprehension. We tested two
new models that added the integrative processes to the
controls, vocabulary breadth, and executive functions.
Tables7 and 8 summarize these models. For comprehension measured with a wordless-book task, the three integrative processes add a 5% of explained variance, which is
significant (F3, 246=5.163, p=.002) and raises the total
explained variance by the model to 20.9%: F10, 246=6.429,
p=.006. Regarding the hypothesis that the effect of working memory is mediated by these processes, the contribution of working memory in this new model is reduced to
nonsignificance, suggesting mediation. We performed
separate Sobel tests for both of the significant integrative
processes (comprehension monitoring and inferences).
For comprehension monitoring, the Sobel test reveals that
the mediated effect is significant: z=2.339, p=.019. For

12 | Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

TABLE 8
Regression Analysis Testing Mediation of Integrative
Processes Between Working Memory and
Comprehension as Measured With the Woodcock
Muoz Story Recall Task: Mediated Model (n = 257)
B

Standard
effect

Days in school

'0.011

0.025

'.027

'0.440

Age in months

'0.094

0.228

'.026

'0.410

Female

'3.192

1.880

'.102

'1.698

Vocabulary
breadth

0.074

0.080

.062

0.923

Working
memory

2.380

0.640

.248

3.716**

Inhibition

'0.499

0.348

'.089

'1.434

Attention

0.990

0.677

.088

1.462

Inferences

0.270

0.297

.057

0.911

Comprehension
monitoring

0.502

0.337

.099

1.493

Theory of mind

0.661

0.558

.080

1.184

Variable

R2
0.158

**p < .01.

inferences, the mediated effect is also significant:

z=2.054, p=.039. Regarding the individual contributions of the three integrative processes, only inferences

and comprehension monitoring have a significant contribution to comprehension (inferences = .156, t = 2.595,
p=.010; monitoring=.157, t=2.445, p=.015), whereas theory of mind does not.
We conducted the same analysis for the Woodcock
Muoz story recall task and found that adding the three
integrative processes only adds a nonsignificant 2% of
explained variance: F3, 246=2.109, p=.1. Consistently,
the effect of working memory on the dependent variable stays virtually the same, so we did not perform the
Sobel test on this analysis.

Total Model
To estimate the variance explained by all of our predictors together, we conducted two final multiple regressions including the controls, vocabulary breadth,
vocabulary depth, working memory, inhibition, attention, inferences, comprehension monitoring, and theory
of mind. These are shown in Tables 9 and 10. For the
wordless-book task, the model explains 22.3%of the
variance: F11, 245=6.385, p=.001. The unique contributions are similar to the two previous models. For the
WoodcockMuoz story recall task, the total model
explains 18.2% of the variance (F11, 245=4.965, p=.000),
and the only two predictors with a significant contribution are working memory and vocabulary breadth.
TABLE 9
Regression Analysis With controls, Vocabulary
Breadth, Vocabulary Depth, Executive Functions, and
Integrative Processes to Explain Comprehension as
Measured With the Wordless-Book Task (n = 257)
Variable

Standard
effect

Days in school

0.015

0.006

.139

2.274*

Age in months

0.058

0.059

.059

0.975

'0.133

0.488

'.016

'0.273

Vocabulary
breadth

0.022

0.021

.068

1.029

Vocabulary
depth

0.077

Working
memory

0.322

Female

0.037
0.169

.148
.125

Summary
In relation to our hypotheses, we found the following:
As predicted, the models that explain performance in the wordless-book and story recall tasks
were not the same. Specifically, recall was only
influenced by working memory and vocabulary,
whereas the wordless-book task was explained by
a mixture of executive functions, vocabulary, and
integrative processes. (Both models, however, explained small amounts of variance.)
Of the two novel variables hypothesized to explain additional comprehension variance, comprehension monitoring explains additional
variance over and above previously studied variables, but theory of mind does not.
Vocabulary depth mediates the effect of vocabulary
breadth on comprehension of the wordless book.
Inferences and comprehension monitoring partially mediate the effect of working memory on
comprehension of a wordless book.

Discussion
Results from this study clarify the interplay among several cognitive and linguistic processes in explaining
TABLE 10
Regression Analysis With Controls, Vocabulary
Breadth, Vocabulary Depth, Executive Functions, and
Integrative Processes to Explain Comprehension as
Measured With the WoodcockMuoz Story Recall Task
(n = 257)

R2
22.3

Standard
effect

Days in school

'0.025

0.025

'.063

'0.996

Age in months

'0.094

0.225

'.026

'0.415

Female

'2.842

1.862

'.091

'1.526

Vocabulary
breadth

0.028

0.081

.023

0.342

Vocabulary
depth

0.377

0.141

.194

2.684**

Working memory

2.069

0.643

.215

3.217**

Variable

18.2

2.102*
1.913

Inhibition

'0.273

0.090

'.182

'3.021**

Inhibition

'0.554

0.345

'.099

'1.607

Attention

0.401

0.176

.133

2.281*

Attention

1.104

0.670

.098

1.648

Inferences

0.158

0.079

.123

1.992*

Inferences

0.063

0.303

.013

0.209

Comprehension
monitoring

0.193

0.088

.141

2.197*

Comprehension
monitoring

0.397

0.335

.078

1.185

Theory of mind

0.005

0.146

.002

0.034

Theory of mind

0.438

0.557

.053

0.787

*p < .05. **p < .01.

R2

**p < .01.

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kindergarten childrens comprehension and recall of

stories. First, analyses show that performance on the
wordless-book task, which required construction of a
coherent representation, is explained moderately well by
a mixture of executive functions, vocabulary, and integrative processes, whereas the measure relying on recall
is only influenced by working memory and vocabulary,
underscoring the difference between recalling isolated
story elements and constructing a coherent representation of a story. It is interesting that not even basic cognitive processes, such as inhibition and attention control,
showed an impact on the recall measure, suggesting that
these processes are more essential for integrating information than for perceiving, retaining, and retrieving it,
even in the context of meaningful stories.
Regarding the explanation of the wordless-book
task, we found the well-known effect of vocabulary and
inferences (Florit etal., 2009, 2011; Lepola etal., 2012;
Tompkins et al., 2013) and also that comprehension
monitoring made a signif icant contribution.
Inconsistency detection had been linked to discourse
comprehension in older children (Fleisher, 1990; Garner
& Reis, 1981; Oakhill etal., 2005) but had not been previously linked to comprehension of discourse in preschoolers, so it is interesting to find that preschoolers
are able to monitor their understanding in spite of their
metacognitive limitations and that this ability predicts
their performance.
The third integrative process that we tested, theory
of mind, was not a significant predictor of childrens
story comprehension. Theory of mind is necessary to
infer relations between events and mental states, such as
to understand how a given event can produce an emotion or how a desire combined with a belief will produce
an action. Theory of mind had a positive significant bivariate correlation with comprehension, but its largest
correlations were with vocabulary measures and comprehension monitoring, suggesting that it is heavily
confounded with linguistic ability, as previous research
has suggested (Ford & Milosky, 2008; Milligan etal.,
2007). However, our finding is inconsistent with that of
Ricketts etal. (2013), who found that social functioning
and language ability had independent unique contributions to the reading comprehension of persons with autistic spectrum disorders. It is possible that in children
this young, general inference-making ability, linguistic
ability, and mental-inference ability are too difficult to
separate to find specific contributions of mental-state
understanding to story comprehension.
Regarding working memory, we found evidence in
support of the hypothesis that its effect on comprehension is partially explained by the role it plays in integrating information, which is consistent with previous
research conducted with older participants (Hannon,
2012).Also consistent with previous research, we found

14 | Reading Research Quarterly, xx(xx)

that working memory retains a direct effect on comprehension, even after controlling for inferences, comprehension monitoring, and vocabulary. This suggests that
there are other contributions of working memory to
comprehension beyond integration and verbal ability.
The finding that working memory had a strong effect
on the story recall task, which required only retaining
isolated elements, highlights the dual role of working
memory in allowing both the retention and integration
of information during comprehension of connected
discourse.
The negative effect of inhibitory skills is intriguing
and will require further research. Due to the fact that
preschool children vary enormously in their expressive
language abilities, it is possible that children who were
unable to inhibit irrelevant verbal responses to the test
situation, and were very talkative, obtained higher
scores in the comprehension measure simply by virtue
of talking more. Imagine a child who produces very
long strings of discourse with every question and a
coder later coding those utterances. There is bound to
be more error when qualifying these childrens responses. This would result in impulsive children receiving higher scores under certain circumstances. This
possibility may warrant a closer look at these childrens
other executive functions to check whether there are interactions or nonlinear effects.
Another factor that we need to consider in interpreting inhibition effects is that in several instances,
Chilean children have shown relatively good performance on measures of inhibition compared with other
samples. Three independent research teams in Chile
have reported near-ceiling effects on measures of gratification delay and pencil tapping in 25-year-old children, whereas these measures work adequately in U.S.
children (Barata, 2011; D. Bravo, personal communication, July 24, 2013; Farkas, 2012). These ceiling effects
may reflect high compliance in Chilean children because of a positive view of obedience and may have affected the range of scores and thus the direction and
strength of associations. Future research should use different measures of inhibition to avoid ceiling effects and
include nonlinear effects of these skills.
Our hypothesis regarding vocabulary measures received support from our results. The effect of vocabulary breadth (size) was reduced drastically and became
nonsignificant after introducing vocabulary depth.
This supports a mediated effect of size of lexicon on
story comprehension, via the precision and sophistication of childrens knowledge of words.
Together, these findings contribute both to our theoretical understanding of discourse comprehension and to
its early stimulation. The importance of early oral language skills is not a new notion, as many studies have
highlighted their importance for later reading

comprehension (Johnston & Kirby, 2006; Nation &

Snowling, 2004; Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2008). The
present study contributes to a more specific understanding
of which oral language skills are relevant to comprehension at this early age and, therefore, should be targeted.
The relevance of adequate early language interventions cannot be overstated in the case of Chile. Chile
has one of the biggest income inequality indexes in the
world (OECD, 2012b), and this inequality translates
into enormous disparities in the language skills of children as young as 2years old (Bravo, 2013), which are
associated with their family income. This is worsened
by the low quality of language stimulation that they receive both at home and in preschool settings. For example, studies of child-directed language in Chile have
shown that poor mothers tend to focus more on alphabet teaching than on building oral language skills
(Reyes, 2012; Strasser & Lissi, 2009). Thus, although socioeconomic status differences in letter recognition
may be large in Chilean kindergartners, differences in
their oral language skills are even larger (Mathiesen,
Herrera, & Pandolfi, 1994; Strasser & Lissi, 2009) and
require stronger compensatory measures by the educational setting. Unfortunately, oral language instruction
in Chilean kindergarten classrooms is characterized by
unstructured conversations with no clear instructional
goal and by an absence of work on word meanings
(Strasser & Lissi, 2009).
Is it possible, at such an early age, to stimulate complex cognitive and linguistic processes such as the ones
highlighted here? Empirical studies show that it is possible to train some of these skills from very early on and
definitively from before children are fluent decoders.
For example, Bianco etal. (2010) evaluated the impact
of a training program for prekindergarten and kindergarten children, based on training three component
skills of comprehension. The researchers trained children to monitor their comprehension of text by teaching them to detect inconsistencies, and they taught
children how to make bridging inferences, which included resolving anaphoric references, interpreting
connectives, and making causal connections; the researchers even went so far as to teach children how to
use logical procedures to solve problems. These skills
were later used to teach the children how to build a coherent representation of the story (situation model).
The teaching occurred through practice and discussions between children and teachers, where children
were encouraged to justify their answers and explain
them to others in the class. Compared with children
who received training in phonological awareness and a
program of repeated storybook readings, children in
the comprehension skills training program showed
more improvement and better final scores on comprehension measures.

As for work on executive functions, interventions

that attempt to improve them in preschoolers are becoming increasingly popular. According to a review by
Diamond and Lee (2011), activities that emphasize selfcontrol, mindfulness, and use of symbols to control behavior have been shown to improve childrens inhibitory
control, attention, and working memory. However,
these skills, which are not typical targets in early literacy programs, may turn out to be crucial for childrens
reading comprehension in the future and should be specifically targeted during language instruction.
Finally, vocabulary instruction has received a great
deal of attention in the literature on elementary and
preschool education. Among researchers, there is consensus that the most productive vocabulary instruction
in the elementary grades includes explicit teaching of
words, teaching of words in context, repeated exposure,
and opportunities for usage (Beck etal., 2002). This
may translate into preschool and kindergarten as well,
but exactly what it takes for vocabulary instruction to
improve discourse comprehension in young children is
not well known. In a storybook reading intervention for
Chilean children up to 5years old, Strasser etal (2013)
found that those who heard explicit definitions of five
rare words per book comprehended the stories significantly better than those who did not hear any word
definitions and that the effect was fully mediated by
childrens ability to use the words but not by their receptive knowledge of them. This shows that vocabulary
instruction of this kind has a potential for improving
childrens vocabulary depth and, in turn, their comprehension skills.
Working on complex processes, such as inference
making, comprehension monitoring, and vocabulary
depth, is challenging in Chile partly because there is very
little complex discourse in preschool classrooms. Books
deemed appropriate for preschoolers in Chile are strikingly simple, and preschool educators, especially in public settings, have very little education themselves. This
provides for oral discourse that does not lend itself to inferring implicit information, discussing nuances of word
meanings, or analyzing inconsistencies in text. One urgent need is to persuade teachers and policymakers that
very young children need access to sources of complex
discourse, such as the kinds of books that are targeted at
first and second graders. Other sources of complex discourse may be equally valid for working on comprehension. Kendeou, van den Broek, White, and Lynch (2007)
present evidence that comprehension strategies generalize across media, such as stories presented aurally or
through video (van den Broek etal., 1996, as cited in
Kendeou etal., 2007) and that these media can be used to
train discourse comprehension skills.
Several methodological issues limit the generalizability of our conclusions. Some of our researcher-made

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instruments had marginally acceptable reliabilities in

the .6.7 range. It is possible that the prevalence of some
predictors over others is due to better psychometric
properties and not to a real predominance. This may
have biased results toward the null hypothesis in the
cases of predictors with lower internal consistencies,
such as theory of mind or inference. It may also have
contributed to the underestimation of explained variance in the case of the wordless-book instrument. In
that case, our results may be a conservative estimate of
the real variance explained in that instrument by our
chosen predictors. A second methodological issue is
that we were unable to use standard scores for any of the
standardized instruments that we used because no
Chilean norms are available. However, because our
sample is rather homogeneous in age and because we
introduced the child s age into all regression models,
this problem is alleviated to some extent.
Low explained variances in both dependent measures also suggest that we have omitted an important
predictor or predictors. One possible candidate is domain knowledge because previous knowledge is known
to be an important influence on comprehension (Cain
etal., 2001). The stories in both dependent measures involved specific content (e.g., bananas, monkeys, capybaras, cars, paint, soccer, baking). We did not measure
previous knowledge, even though children are likely to
have varied in it. This is especially the case for the
wordless picture book because there are no monkeys,
capybaras, or banana trees in Chile, and childrens previous contact with these concepts may have varied considerably. To avoid biases caused by ignoring these
sources of variation among children, future research
should take into account childrens differential familiarity with the genres and their background knowledge
as relevant to the measures used to assess cognitive and
linguistic abilities.
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CHILDREN S LITERATURE CITED

Da Coll, I. (2006). Chigiro encuentra ayuda [Capybara finds help].
Bogot, Colombia: Babel.

KATHERINE STRASSER (corresponding author) is an

associate professor in the School of Psychology at
PontificiaUniversidad Catlica de Chile in Santiago;
e-mail kstrasse@uc.cl.
FRANCISCA DEL RO is an associate professor in the Faculty
of Education at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile;
e-mail francisca.delrio@mail.udp.cl.

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