research hypothesis in reading comprehension

Investigating the Role of Test Methods in Testing Reading Comprehension pp 9–29 Cite as

Theories of Reading Comprehension

• Jufang Kong 2  
• First Online: 28 March 2019

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‘We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction’ (Neurath & Cohen, 1973 , p. 199). A research is by no means entirely new judged from every aspect but gradually built upon old knowledge. The following four chapters serve as a review of the important concepts of reading comprehension, validity, test method and mixed research methods in literature. This chapter mainly discusses the key theories of reading comprehension. After several influential theories and models of reading comprehension are outlined, the chapter examines the factors affecting reading comprehension process, namely, reader, text and the interaction between reader and text. The chapter ends with Khalifa and Weir’s model of reading comprehension based on which the current empirical study was carried out and the summary of this chapter.

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Kong, J. (2019). Theories of Reading Comprehension. In: Investigating the Role of Test Methods in Testing Reading Comprehension. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7021-2_2

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Synthesis of Research / Reading Comprehension: What Works

Ample time for text reading, getting the most out of reading time, teacher-directed instruction, opportunities for peer and collaborative learning, time to talk about reading, a call for multiple approaches.

• large amounts of time for actual text reading,
• teacher-directed instruction in comprehension strategies,
• opportunities for peer and collaborative learning, and
• occasions for students to talk to a teacher and one another about their responses to reading.
• Choice . Teachers can give children opportunities and guidance in making text selections. Although we know of no research that directly links choice to reading comprehension growth, we speculate that choice is related to interest and motivation, both of which are related directly to learning (Anderson et al. 1987).
• Optimal difficulty . Teachers can monitor students' and their own selections to ensure that all students spend most of their time reading books that are appropriate in difficulty—not so hard that a student's cognitive resources are occupied with just figuring out how to pronounce the words and not so easy that nothing new is likely to be learned.
• Multiple readings . Teachers can honor and encourage rereading of texts, which research suggests leads to greater fluency and comprehension (Allington 1983a). Although most research about repeated reading of passages has focused on improvements in reading speed, accuracy, phrasing, and intonation, a growing number of studies have documented improved comprehension as well (Dowhower 1987).
• Negotiating meaning socially . “Silent” reading time shouldn't be entirely silent. Teachers can (a) allow part of the time for reading in pairs, including pairs of different abilities and ages (Koskinen and Blum 1986, Labbo and Teale 1990); and (b) provide regular opportunities for readers to discuss their reading with the teacher and with one another. We view reading comprehension as a social as well as a cognitive process. Conversation not only raises the status of independent silent reading from a time filler to an important part of the reading program; it also gives students another opportunity to practice and build comprehension skills collaboratively, a topic to which we return below. Atwell (1987) and Hansen (1987) further argue that these conversations help to build the all-important community of readers that is the essence of literature-based programs.
• using background knowledge to make inferences (Hansen and Pearson 1983) or set purposes (Ogle 1986);
• getting the main idea (Baumann 1984);
• identifying the sources of information needed to answer a question (Raphael and Pearson 1985); and
• using the typical structure of stories (Fitzgerald and Spiegel 1983) or expository texts (Armbruster et al. 1987) to help students understand what they are reading.
• Changing teacher-student interaction patterns . In the traditional recitation format, teachers choose the topics and, through feedback to students, control which student answers are viewed as correct and incorrect. One outcome of the recitation format is that teachers talk a lot! Typically, teachers talk as much as or more than all students combined, because their questions and feedback focus on transmitting the text interpretation they have in mind and because of the monitoring function that teachers naturally perform when they are in charge of a discussion. Tharp and Gallimore (1989) use the terms responsive teaching and instructional conversations to contrast effective teacher-student dialogues with such recitations. In responsive teaching, teachers plan instruction by anticipating a range of student responses in addition to thinking about their own interpretations. They then use student input into discussions and student text interpretations to move the discussion to higher levels. Teachers might still nominate topics and opinions for group consideration, but student input drives the discussion forward. Changing the pattern of classroom discussions to allow more student input and control is no easy task. Alvermann and Hayes (1989), for example, found that it was much easier for teachers to change the level of questions they asked (for example, move to more inferential, evaluative, and critical thinking questions) than it was for them to change the basic structure or pattern of interactions in classroom discussions. Teachers suggested two main reasons for the persistence of the recitation format in their classrooms: maintaining control and ensuring coverage of important information and canonical interpretations.
• [[[[[ **** LIST ITEM IGNORED **** ]]]]]
• Embedding strategy instruction in text reading . Even in teacher-student discussions focused around a shared understanding of important text information, new ideas are emerging about how to build this shared understanding in a way that will teach students something about comprehension as well as text information. For example, in situated cognition (Brown et al. 1989), learning about comprehension strategies is embedded in discussions about texts. The cognitive activities students engage in are much like the ones that have been the focus of research about explicit instruction in comprehension strategies, such as summarizing and getting the main idea. The difference is that the focus is on learning authentic information in the texts—for example, discovering how photosynthesis works by reading a chapter about it—with comprehension strategy learning as a secondary outcome of repeated engagement in such discussions about many different texts. The belief is that students will internalize effective comprehension strategies through repeated situations in which they read and discuss whole texts with a teacher and peers.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Impact of background music on reading comprehension: influence of lyrics language and study habits.

• 1 Department of Applied Psychology, College of Sports and Health, Shandong Sport University, Jinan, China
• 2 School of Physical Education, Shandong University, Jinan, China
• 3 Department of Insurance, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, China
• 4 School of Psychology, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, China
• 5 Zizhong Middle School, Linqing, China
• 6 College of Physical Education and Health, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China

Numerous studies have explored the effects of background music on reading comprehension, however, little is known about how native language (L1) lyrics and second language (L2) lyrics in background music influence reading comprehension performance for college students. The present study used a mixed experimental design to examine the effects of listening habits (between-participants variable: non-listeners or listeners), music type (between-participants variable: L1 (Mandarin) pop music, L2 (English) pop music or no music) and text language (within-participants variable: L1 or L2) on reading comprehension of college students in East China. A total of 90 participants (50 females) were screened into non- listeners ( n  = 45) and listeners ( n  = 45), and then were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Mandarin pop music group ( n = 30), English pop music group ( n  = 30) and no music group ( n  = 30). The results showed that reading comprehension performance was negatively affected by music with lyrics compared to the no music condition. Furthermore, Chinese/English reading comprehension was reduced more by pop music in the same language as the written texts. As expected, non-listeners were more negatively affected by music with lyrics than listeners. For both listeners and non-listeners, average reading comprehension accuracy rates were the lowest in the condition of music with native language lyrics. Overall, our research findings indicate that listening to pop music with lyrics reduces reading comprehension performance. However, listening to background music cause much less distraction if the students commonly listen to music while reading. The current study supports the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

1 Introduction

Listening to music while studying is a common and popular trend for college students. Calderwood et al. (2014) found that 59% of the college students chose to listen to music during a 3-h study session, with 21% listening for more than 90% of the time. Although several studies have demonstrated positive effects of background instrumental music on reading comprehension ( Carlson et al., 2004 ; Khaghaninejad et al., 2016 ) and second language learning ( Kang and Williamson, 2012 ), irrelevant sound from vocal music may cause auditory distraction from the task at hand ( Martin et al., 1988 ; Furnham and Strbac, 2002 ; Perham and Currie, 2014 ; Zhang et al., 2018 ; Du et al., 2020 ). Efficient learning is extremely important for college students. However, high levels of auditory distraction will not only affect efficient learning, but also impair mental and physical function and cause irritation and headaches in schools ( Astolfi et al., 2019 ). Thus, it is important to explore the mechanisms that produce auditory distraction. According to the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, the disruptive effect can be induced by interference-by-process or attentional capture ( Marsh et al., 2008 , 2009 ). To date, previous studies investigating the impact of music on reading comprehension have primarily focused on differences between instrumental and lyrical music (e.g., Erten et al., 2015 ), as well as the influence of differences in musical volume and speed (e.g., Thompson et al., 2012 ). Notably, these studies have not taken into consideration differences in participant preferences for listening to music while reading. In contrast, the present study investigated how differences in the lyrical language of the same song differentially influence reading comprehension based on reported music-listening habits. With the aim of testing the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, our study explored the interactive effects of native language (L1) lyrics and second language (L2) lyrics in music on reading comprehension performance in L1 and L2 for listeners and non-listeners by using a 3-factor mixed experimental design.

1.1 A duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction

According to the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, there are two functionally different types of auditory distraction. Interference-by-process occurs when a similar process used consciously to complete a focal task competes with the involuntary processing of sound. On the other hand, regardless of the task processes involved, attentional capture occurs when the sound triggers a disengagement of attention from the dominant task ( Hughes, 2014 ). For example, semantic speech (e.g., “orange, banana, strawberry”) can cause distraction effects on semantic-based cognitive tasks (e.g., free recall of visually presented words “apple, mango, pear”) ( Marsh et al., 2008 ). According to the interference-by-process theory, semantically similar speech automatically spreads activation through a long-term semantic network, interfering with the similar process of navigating such networks to retrieve information for the focal task ( Marsh and Jones, 2010 ; Hughes, 2014 ). Interference-by-process explains the semantic distraction effects. Attentional capture falls into two categories: When a sound’s unique content (such as one’s name or one’s native language) gives it the ability to deflect attention, a specific attentional capture takes place. In contrast, when an occurrence draws attention despite having nothing inherently attention-grabbing about it, but rather because of the context in which it takes place, nonspecific attentional capture is created ( Eimer et al., 1996 ). For example, a sound “B” in “CCCCCBCC” or a sound “C” in “BBBBBCBB.” Our study focused on interference-by-process and a specific attentional capture.

1.2 The impact of background music on reading comprehension

Reading comprehension, an important and necessary skill for effective academic learning in college, refers to the active process by which individuals understand and construct the meaning of texts based on prior knowledge and experience ( Perfetti et al., 2005 ). Kämpfe et al. (2010) claimed that reading might be more disturbed by vocal music than by instrumental music ( Kämpfe et al., 2010 ). The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been supported by research evidence demonstrating the disruptive effects of background speech on various memory tasks such as serial short-term memory tasks. However, little is known about supporting evidence from the distraction effects of L1/L2 lyrics on L1/L2 reading comprehension among listeners and non-listeners. According to the simple view of reading model, reading comprehension consists of only two parts, word recognition and language comprehension, and both parts are necessary for reading success ( Hoover and Gough, 1990 ). For college students, mature readers whose word recognition has attained to a level of automation, language comprehension plays the more important role in reading comprehension. Lyrics in music contain semantic information, which will interfere with language comprehension ( Martin et al., 1988 ; Oswald et al., 2000 ). Thus, we expect that lyrics will induce semantic distraction effects on reading comprehension performance. Our first hypothesis was that the accuracy rates in music conditions would be significantly lower than the accuracy rates with no music for college students (H1).

The impact of background music on reading comprehension is generally contingent on multiple factors such as music types (instrumental or lyric music with various tempos, intensity, familiarity) ( Banbury et al., 2001 ; Hallam and Mac Donald, 2009 ). In addition to music types, previous studies have confirmed that the effects of music on reading comprehension can be significantly different in various levels of individual diversity (e.g., personality and music preferences) or difficulty of the reading comprehension task ( Kiger, 1989 ; Kallinen, 2002 ; Anderson and Fuller, 2010 ). For example, Anderson and Fuller (2010) suggested that disruptive effects of background lyrical music on reading comprehension was more pronounced for 7th- and 8th-grade students exhibiting a stronger preference for the lyrical music, compared with their performance in a quiet environment. Our experimental work focused on identifying interactive effects of music (pop music with L1/L2 lyrics), individual habits (e.g., listening to music in daily study) and tasks (L1/L2 written texts), which helps test whether interference-by-process and a specific attentional capture occurs.

First, pop music is the preferred music genre for most college students ( Etaugh and Michals, 1975 ; Wang and Wang, 2015 ). For example, Wang and Wang (2015) surveyed 3,688 Chinese college students in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Shanghai, Henan and Jiangxi regions of Mainland China, and found that: (1) the proportion of college students who liked pop music was as high as 65.05%; (2) 35.23% college students chose “love” as their favorite pop music theme comparing with themes “nostalgic” 33.21%, “witty/humorous” 14.27%, “alternative” 9.49%,“other” 15.73%; (3) 47.85% college student’ favorite singers are from “Hong Kong and Taiwan.” Thus, we choose a masterpiece of classic Mandarin pop music “The Goodbye Kiss” (sung by Jacky Cheung) as the music. Although the song was released in 1993, from its release to 2020, there have been covers of the song by well-known singers almost every year. Specially, this song was covered by Michael Learns to Rock (MLTR) in 2004, and the English version of this song “Take me to your heart” became a classic of international music. Comparing the lyrics of the two songs, the Mandarin lyrics of “The Goodbye Kiss” have a total of 52 sentences, and the whole song is divided into two subsections. The shortest sentence in Mandarin lyrics has a total of five Chinese words, and the longest sentence has 19 words; the English lyrics reproduce the characteristics of the original Chinese sentence well in terms of sentence length and neatness, the shortest sentence consists of four words, and the longest is only 10 words ( Wei, 2012 ). Thus, we chose the pop music with lyrics “The Goodbye Kiss” as our vocal music.

Second, Mandarin Chinese (L1) and English (L2) are the top 2 most spoken languages in the world, and belong to two different language families ( Ethnologue, n.d. ). Additionally, all Chinese students begin their English study in their third year of primary school or even earlier, and studying English is a key subject for the Chinese college entrance examination required for admission to the university. They will continue to study English to pass College English Test Band 4/6 (CET- 4/6, essential English exams for Chinese college students) in college, and have considerable exposure to English music. English is the most important and widely studied second language for most Chinese college students. Hence, we chose Chinse college students from Mainland China who learn English as a second language for the experiment. Based on the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, when a similar process is used purposefully to accomplish a focal cognitive task and the involuntary processing of sound competes with it, interference-by-process occurs ( Hughes, 2014 ). In our experiment, interference-by-process is produced when lyrics are presented to college students who are deliberately completing a focal reading comprehension task, especially when the lyrics language is the same as the text language in the reading comprehension tasks. That is, the semantic activation of lyrics competes with the semantic access of reading comprehension tasks with the same language as lyrics. Thus, our hypothesis is that Chinese/English reading comprehension accuracy rates when listening to music in the same language would be significantly lower than that in different languages or no music (H2). To be specific, we hypothesized that Chinese reading comprehension accuracy rates when listening to music with Mandarin lyrics would be significantly lower than when listening to music with English lyrics, and English reading comprehension accuracy rates when listening to English music would be significantly lower than when listening to Mandarin music.

Third, students frequently report that listening to music while studying is useful ( Etaugh and Ptasnik, 1982 ), and these students are more likely to form the habit of listening to music in daily study. However, students without the habit instinctively think that music listening can provide a distraction that might affect reading comprehension. Individual differences in inhibitory control may exist between two groups. Inhibitory control refers to the ability to suppress an inappropriate reaction or disregard distracting or irrelevant information, and increased inhibitory control in students probably makes it easier for them to ignore distractions in their surroundings and concentrate on tasks inside and outside of the classroom ( Privitera et al., 2022b ). However, non-listeners do not develop the habit of listening to music while studying, probably because they have a low level of inhibitory control to concentrate on the focal tasks. Thus, we hypothesized that college students who typically did not report listening to music during study (non-listeners) would have lower reading comprehension accuracy rates than listeners when music was present (H3).

Based on the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, regardless of the quality of target tasks (e.g., Chinese/English comprehension), auditory attentional capture happens whenever a sound produces a disengagement from tasks. Numerous sound varieties (e.g., one’s own name, or her own infant’s screams for a mother) have abilities to specifically captivate attention ( Hughes, 2014 ). Native language (Mandarin Chinese) is familiar and highly dominant, and may cause a specific attentional capture. We expect that both non-listeners and listeners may be more susceptible to auditory distraction when Mandarin music is present rather than English music. That is, in general, people’s ability to understand what they read was worse when they listened to music with native language compared to music in a second language or no music at all. Thus, for both non-listeners and listeners, we hypothesized that average reading comprehension accuracy rates (without distinction between Chinese and English) would be the lowest in the condition of Mandarin music compared with the English/no music condition (H4).

1.3 Research questions

In sum, it is worth examining the effects of different habits of listening to music on reading comprehension performance, which can help clarify whether cultivating habits of listening to music while studying is valuable or not. In addition, few studies used both lyrics languages and music-listening habits while study to explore distractive effects of music on reading comprehension. To solve this problem, in this paper, we designed an experiment to explore the effects of music type, written text language and listening habits on reading comprehension among Chinese college students. Our research questions are: (1) would the accuracy rates in music conditions be significantly lower than the accuracy rates with no music for college students? (2) would Chinese/English reading comprehension accuracy rates when listening to music in the same language be significantly lower than that in different languages or no music? (3) would non-listeners have lower L1 and L2 reading comprehension accuracy rates than listeners when music was present? (4) would average reading comprehension accuracy rates (without distinction between Chinese and English) be the lowest in the condition of Mandarin music compared with the English/no music condition?

2.1 Participants

Before the experiment, we calculated the minimum sample size of each group of participants using G*Power 3.1.9.7 software ( Faul et al., 2007 ) to reach the statistical power. For observing a similar effect to relevant studies ( Peng et al., 2017 ), we use Effect size f  = 0.22, ɑ = 0.05, 1-β = 0.8 as parameters, number of groups = 6, number of measurements = 2, non-sphericity correction = 1; under the F test of ANOVA: repeated measures, within-between interaction ( Faul et al., 2021 ). Hence the total minimum number of participants should be 72, and the minimum number of participants in each large group should be 36.

The participants were screened by filling out a researcher-designed questionnaire of background music listening habits. All participants were recruited randomly from Shandong Sport University in Shandong Province of Mainland China. A total of 90 participants (50 females) between 18 to 21 years of age (Mean = 19.14, SD = 0.92) were selected. Our experiment divided the participants into 2 large groups first: listeners (45 participants) and non-listeners (45 participants). Participants in each large group were randomly assigned to one of three groups: 15 Mandarin pop music group, 15 English pop music group and 15 no music group. All six groups of participants were assigned Chinese and English texts.

Participants were native Mandarin Chinese speakers who started learning English in the third grade of primary school. None of the participants were music majors and English majors, and none of the participants had any formal musical training. They were all right-handed with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The experimental protocol was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Shandong Sport University in China, and conducted in compliance with institutional guidelines and regulations. All participants signed an informed consent form prior to the experiment.

2.2 Experimental design

This study used a mixed factorial experimental design. There were two between-participants independent variables and a within-participants independent variable. The between-participants variables were listening habits (with two levels: listeners or non-listeners) and music type (with three levels: Mandarin pop music, English pop music or no music). The within-participants variable was text language (with two levels: Chinese or English). The dependent variable was accuracy rates for the reading comprehension tasks. Accuracy rates were defined as the mean percentage of the number of Chinese (English) reading comprehension items answered correctly in the total number of Chinese (English) reading comprehension items.

2.3 Materials and apparatus

Materials consisted of a questionnaire, pop music stimuli and written texts. The questionnaire was Researcher-designed Background Music Listening Habits Questionnaire, a self-report survey that was developed to assess participants’ habits of listening to music during study. This scale contained 15 items, each item rated on a Likert 5-point scale ranging from 1 to 5 (1 = Do not agree at all, 2 = Hardly agree, 3 = not sure, 4 = Mostly agree, 5 = Completely agree), and was scored as a continuous variable from 15 (minimum score) to 75 (maximum score). The Cronbach’s ɑ of the scale was 0.87. We used the questionnaire to screen listeners (a total score higher than 60, 60 is the average score of selecting option 4) and non-listeners (a total score lower than 30, 30 is the average score of selecting option 2) to examine distinct effects of listening habits on reading comprehension performance in the formal experiment.

Mandarin song “The Goodbye Kiss” (Mandarin name “Wen3 Bie2,” sung by Jacky Cheung) and English song “Take Me to Your Heart” (sung by Michael Learns to Rock) were used as background music stimuli, as these two songs have the same rhythm and tempo. The two songs were once popular music that are familiar to most Chinese college students. We used a music editor software Adobe Audition CS6 (Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, CA, United States) to delete the blank space of “The Goodbye Kiss,” and the part with lyrics was kept to ensure that the participants could always be in a music environment with lyrics while carrying out reading comprehension tasks.

Chinese texts (300 character for each text) were selected from simulated tests of the College Entrance Examination; these texts are all about science and technology. English texts (150 words for each text) about education were selected from Public English Test System 3 (PET-3) tests. Preliminary tests were conducted on 120 college students, and finally 7 Chinese texts (coefficient of difficulty between 0.81 and 0.87) and 7 English texts (coefficient of difficulty between 0.85 and 0.90) were selected. There are no significant differences in difficulty coefficient of the 14 written texts. The difficulty coefficient of each text was estimated by the mean number of correct answers/4 (total number of questions). The coefficient of difficulty 0.81 indicates that, on average, three questions were correctly answered by college students. Participants read passages that were two paragraphs long, and then answered four true or false items following each passage. The items include both literal and inferential comprehension questions. Answers to literal questions involve facts such as who, when, where and what, and they can always be found in the texts. For example, “As early as 1909, Max Mow confirmed that there are some cells in the blood that can make blood, True or False.” For inferential questions, participants are required to determine a text’s meaning indirectly by using the information provided in the text. For example, “By the time most students graduate from high school, they spend less time watching TV than they do in class, True or False.” 3 Chinese texts and 3 English texts were used for assessing the levels of reading comprehension of all three groups (L1 pop music, L2 pop music and no music) of participants before the formal experiments. This was done to make sure that there were no significant differences of Chinese and English reading comprehension levels among the three groups. A different set of 3 Chinese texts and 3 English texts were used for the formal experiments. A Chinese text (difficulty coefficient 0.84) and an English text (difficulty coefficient 0.90) were selected for use in the practice phase.

The apparatus consisted of Lenovo laptops (Yoga 14 s, Lenovo Group Ltd., Beijing, China), noise-canceling headphones (SONY WH-1000XM3, Sony Corp., Tokyo, Japan) and E-prime 2.0. The music stimuli, instructions, texts and questions were all presented on Lenovo laptops using programs written in E-prime 2.0 (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA, United States) ( Schneider et al., 2012a , b ).

2.4 Procedure

Participants filled out the informed consent for participating in the study, then were screened by filling out the Questionnaire of Background Music Listening Habits online. Based on the questionnaire total score, the participants were divided into two large group: listeners and non-listeners. Participants in each large group were randomly assigned to one of three groups (Mandarin music, English music and no music). All three groups of participants completed Chinese and English reading comprehension tasks without music before formal experiments, and no significant differences of Chinese and English reading comprehension performance were observed among the three groups.

In the formal experiment phase, all participants were asked to complete experiment tasks in a quiet lab, with 10 participants in each group seated at individual tables with Lenovo laptops and headphones. First, participants were told to put on headphones and conduct the experiment on Lenovo laptops individually. All music was played between 60 dB ~ 65 dB(A), each participant first put on the headphones and checked to see whether the playback function of the headphones was normal. Then, Participants completed Chinese and English reading comprehension test items under each condition of music type. For each condition, half of the participants read the Chinese text first and the other half read the English text first. The 3 Chinese texts and 3 English texts were presented to participants randomly. After reading each passage, participants pressed the spacebar to end the reading (The maximum reading time for each text is 5 min), and proceeded to answer comprehension questions by pressing “T” (indicating truth) or “F” (indicating false) on keyboards. The flow chart of the experimental procedure presented using E-prime 2.0 was shown in Figure 1 .

Figure 1 . The flow chart of the experimental procedure presented using E-prime 2.0.

Participants were asked to answer questions as accurately as possible after reading the passages and to ignore the music. The accuracy rate of each participant was calculated by the total number of Chinese/English items answered correctly/12 (the total number of Chinese/English reading comprehension items). Every participant completed both Chinese texts and English texts in one of three conditions (Mandarin Chinese pop music, English pop music and no music). We tested the effects of listening to music in the same language conditions (L1 music + L1 texts, L2 music + L2 texts) or different language conditions (L1 music + L2 texts, L2 music + L1 texts). For example, participants listening to L1 (Mandarin Chinese) pop music completed L1 (Chinese) texts (the same as lyrics language) and L2 (English) texts (different from lyrics language). Music was played until all participants finished reading comprehension test items.

2.5 Statistical analyses

The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (IBM SPSS, version 23.0; IBM SPSS, Armonk, NY, United States) was used for analysis of the data. The assumptions of ANOVA (homogeneity of variances and normal distribution) were tested. Then the reading comprehension accuracy rates were analyzed using a three-way mixed ANOVA with a within-participants factor (two types of written text language) and two between-participant variables (listening habits and music type). The alpha criterion was set to 0.05. Bonferroni correction was carried out for all post hoc analyses.

One-way ANOVA revealed that baseline reading comprehension performances of three groups (Mandarin music group, English music group and no music group) have no significant difference [Chinese: F (2, 87) = 0.226, p  = 0.718; English: F (2, 87) = 0.217, p  = 0.806].

3.1 Descriptive statistics

Means and standard deviations of the reading comprehension accuracy rates are shown in Table 1 . A three-way mixed ANOVA for reading comprehension accuracy rates, including two between-participants factors (2 listening habit, 3 music type) and one within-participants factor (2 written text language) was performed ( Table 2 ).

Table 1 . Reading comprehension accuracy rates [mean (standard deviations)] by group and condition.

Table 2 . A three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) of reading comprehension accuracy rates.

3.2 Main effect analysis and interactive effect analyses

3.2.1 main effects of music type.

We tested our hypothesis (H1) that the accuracy rates in music conditions would be significantly lower than the accuracy rates with no music for college students. We performed a three-way mixed ANOVA for reading comprehension accuracy rates to obtain the main effects and interactive effects. Significant main effects of music type [ F (2, 87) = 232.791, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.847] were observed as shown in Table 2 . Post hoc analyses revealed the accuracy rates in Mandarin and English music conditions are significantly lower than the accuracy rates with no music ( ps < 0.01). A mean difference of accuracy rates was −0.081 between Mandarin music and English music condition (95% CI: [−0.110, −0.051]), and was −0.175 between English music and no music condition (95% CI: [−0.205, −0.145]). Thus, the results confirmed our hypothesis H1. The result reveals that music with lyrics decreased reading comprehension performance as compared to no music.

3.2.2 Interactive effects of music type and text language

Our second hypothesis (H2) was confirmed by using a three-way mixed ANOVA. H2 was that Chinese/English reading comprehension accuracy rates when listening to music in the same language would be significantly lower than those with different languages. We observed a significant interaction between music type and text language [ F (2, 87) = 113.829, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.730] as shown in Table 2 . For Chinese reading comprehension, as shown in Figure 2 , post hoc analyses showed that the accuracy rates in Mandarin music group were significantly lower than English music group [ t (58) = −5.526, p < 0.001] and no music group [ t (58) = −8.420, p < 0.001]. A mean difference of Chinese reading accuracy rates was −0.286 between Mandarin music and English music condition (95% CI: [−0.392, −0.180]), and was −0.378 between Mandarin music and no music condition (95% CI: [−0.484, −0.272]). For English reading comprehension, the accuracy rates in the English music group were significantly lower than the Mandarin music group [ t (58) = −2.385, p = 0.023 < 0.05; Figure 2 ] and the no music group [ t (58) = −7.041, p < 0.001; Figure 2 ]. A mean difference of English reading accuracy rates was −0.125 between English music and Mandarin music condition (95% CI: [−0.234, −0.016]), and was −0.258 between English music and no music condition (95% CI: [−0.367, −0.150]). These results confirmed our hypothesis H2, and suggested that college students were more distracted by music in the same language as the written texts.

Figure 2 . Accuracy rates of Chinese reading comprehension and English reading comprehension for different music types. ** p  < 0.01; *** p  < 0.001.

3.2.3 Main effects of listening habits and interactive effects of listening habits and music type

Three-way mixed ANOVA was also used to test our third hypothesis (H3) that non-listeners would have lower reading comprehension accuracy rates than listeners when music was present. The results in Table 2 showed that a significant main effect of listening habits [ F (1, 88) = 634.331, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.883]. Post hoc analyses revealed that reading comprehension accuracy rates were lower in non-listeners than listeners ( p < 0.001). The Table 2 also showed that the interactive effects of listening habits and music type were significant [ F (2, 87) = 160.672, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.793]. Post hoc analyses showed significantly lower reading comprehension accuracy rates in the non-listeners compared to listeners, in conditions of music as shown in Figure 3 [Mandarin music: t (58) = −138.782, p < 0.001; English music: t (58) = −99.729, p < 0.001]. A mean difference of accuracy rates between non-listeners and listeners was −0.430 in the Mandarin music condition (95% CI: [−0.464, −0.396]), and was −0.309 in the English music condition (95% CI: [−0.343, −0.274]). These results suggest that reading comprehension performance was more negatively affected by music in the non-listeners than in the listeners, confirming our third hypothesis (H3).

Figure 3 . Reading comprehension accuracy rates in different music type groups for different listening habits. *** p  < 0.001.

Significant interaction effects between listening habits and music type [ F (2, 87) = 160.672, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.793] were observed as shown in Table 2 . For the non-listeners, as shown in Figure 4 , post hoc analyses revealed the accuracy rates while listening to Mandarin music are significantly lower than with English music [ t (58) = −45.508, p  < 0.001] and significantly lower than accuracy rates with no music [ t (58) = −150.401, p < 0.001]. A mean difference of reading accuracy rates was −0.142 between Mandarin music and English music condition (95% CI: [−0.183, −0.100]), and was −0.467 between Mandarin music and no music condition (95% CI: [−0.508, −0.425]); For the listener, post hoc analyses revealed the accuracy rates while listening to Mandarin music are significantly lower than accuracy rates with no music [ t (58) = −14.524, p < 0.001]. A mean difference of reading accuracy rates was −0.045 between Mandarin music and no music condition (95% CI: [−0.086, −0.003]). Thus, the results also supported our hypothesis H4 that average reading comprehension accuracy rates (without distinction between Chinese and English) would be the lowest in the condition of Mandarin music compared with the English/no music condition for both non-listeners and listeners. These results suggested that music with native language lyrics negatively affected the reading comprehension performance of college students.

Figure 4 . Reading comprehension accuracy rates in different listening habits groups for different music types. * p  < 0.05; *** p  < 0.001.

4 Discussion

The main purpose of this study was to explore the disruptive effects of background music lyrics on first language (L1) and second language (L2) reading comprehension performance among Chinese college students. We also included the influence of music-listening habits by using a 3-factor mixed factorial experimental design. First, our results showed that reading comprehension accuracy rates in music conditions are significantly lower than the accuracy rates with no music. Second, L1/L2 reading comprehension accuracy rates when listening to music in the same language are significantly lower than when listening to a different language. Third, the results showed that significantly lower accuracy rates in non-listeners than listeners when music was played. Finally, for both the non-listeners and listeners, average reading comprehension accuracy rates are the lowest in the condition of Mandarin music compared with English/no music condition. Our results provide experimental evidence in support of distraction effects of L1 or L2 music on L1 and L2 reading comprehension performance among Chinese college students. In addition, our findings also offer additional evidence in favor of the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction. Overall, the results support our hypotheses.

4.1 The effect of music type

Compared to the no music condition, reading comprehension performance were reduced by music with lyrics. This result is consistent with previous studies which found disruptive effects of vocal music on reading comprehension ( Anderson and Fuller, 2010 ; Perham and Currie, 2014 ; Ren and Xu, 2019 ; Dong et al., 2022 ). Thompson et al. (2012) showed that fast and loud instrumental music disrupts reading comprehension more than slow-tempo music ( Thompson et al., 2012 ). However, though the music in our study is slow-tempo, disruptive effects on reading comprehension were still observed. Lyrics had a significantly detrimental effect on reading comprehension. The finding of the current study supports the interference-by-process in the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction. According to the interference-by-process, music with lyrics in both L1 and L2 detracted from the performance because semantically processing of the lyrics in these two languages conflicts with semantic processing and access that reading demands ( Quan and Kuo, 2023 ). For comparison, some researchers used musical excerpts in combination with meaningless words as music stimuli. The musical excerpts with meaningless lyrics were unknown to the participants to avoid any associations between the music and semantic or episodic memory. Their results showed neither an enhancing nor a detrimental effect on verbal learning when different styles of background music were played ( Jäncke and Sandmann, 2010 ). However, the present study indicated that music with meaningful lyrics interferes with reading comprehension performance. Language comprehension plays an important role in reading comprehension performance ( Hoover and Gough, 1990 ), and both lyrics and written texts contained semantic information. According to the duplex-mechanism account, from the perspective of the interference-by-process, the semantic interference effects can be explained by assuming that semantic speech triggers automatic spreading of semantic activation over a long-term semantic network that interferes with the analogous process of steering such networks for the purpose of retrieval in the reading comprehension tasks ( Marsh and Jones, 2010 ; Hughes, 2014 ). Therefore, the lyrics act as competing stimuli with written texts and impair their access to word meaning.

4.2 The interaction between music type and text language

Regardless of whether the music and texts were in their L1 or L2 language, Chinese college students were more distracted by music in the same language as the texts. This result indicates that a more detrimental effect on reading comprehension occurred when the auditory input (music lyrics) is the same as the written text language. Based on interference-by-process, the irrelevant semantic information from the speech creates competition for the primary tasks’ dynamic semantic encoding and retrieval processes. As they both vie for semantic access, impairment can therefore be explained in terms of a relative difficulty in choosing the appropriate source of semantic information ( Marsh et al., 2009 ). When lyrics language is the same as the text, the competition process becomes stronger and thus the selection process is more difficult, which causes a more disruptive effect on reading performance. We used music lyrics with L1/L2 as different potential sources of auditory distraction, and the finding provides a further strand of support for interference-by-process.

4.3 The effect of listening habits

Our results revealed that reading comprehension performance by the non-listeners were more negatively affected by music than the listeners. These findings are in line with the results of previous studies which showed that people who seldom studied in the presence of background music performed better on reading comprehension tasks in silence ( Etaugh and Michals, 1975 ; Etaugh and Ptasnik, 1982 ). These results indicate that background music caused detrimental effects for individuals who normally study without music. In contrast, college students who regularly listen to music while studying have much experience of listening to music, and the top-down features (e.g., high working memory and high inhibitory control) can lessen the interference to cognitive activities caused by shared processing of irrelevant information ( Quan and Kuo, 2023 ; Privitera et al., 2023b ). Specifically, differences in working memory/inhibitory control between non-listeners and listeners may lead the differential effects of music on reading comprehension, because working memory may generally have an impact on individual ability to carry out cognitive tasks while listening to music ( König et al., 2005 ; Christopher and Shelton, 2017 ), and it is generally observed that those with high working memory capacity are less easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli ( Hughes, 2014 ). Recent studies also revealed that differences in inhibitory and/or attentional control could predict academic performance including reading (e.g., Privitera et al., 2023b ), thus, the relatively low working memory/inhibitory control may make non-listeners were more disrupted by music compared with listeners. In other words, though listeners are negatively affected by music, they are accustomed to reading in the presence of music, thus background music sounds are less distracting for them.

4.4 The interaction between listening habits and music type

Our results indicated that for both non-listeners and listeners, music with native language lyrics negatively affected the average reading comprehension performance. The results provide support for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction: in addition to interference-by-process, sound can also produce unnecessary distraction by attentional capture. Music lyrics with the same language as the written texts distract college students by interfering specifically with the similar semantic access processes involved in the reading comprehension task. In contrast, music with native language lyrics disengages students from reading comprehension tasks. Compared to L2 lyrics, native language lyrics are high dominant and more familiar, which may make students rely too much on music rather than keeping them from reading due to music. Thus, a specific attentional capture also caused the auditory distraction. This finding of auditory distraction in different lyrics language conditions provides additional evidence in favor of the duplex-mechanism account.

4.5 Limitations and further research

Several limitations should be noted. First, the participants’ English language proficiency, cognitive control and working memory were not assessed. In future study the L2 proficiency can be balanced to explore unique music lyrics effects on reading comprehension, because recent studies have shown that L2 proficiency are correlated to inhibition and attentional control ( Privitera et al., 2022a , 2023a ), and cognitive control has been found to have a significant impact on academic performance including reading ( Privitera et al., 2023b ). Working memory/cognitive control can be included as a key variable to explore its effect on reading comprehension while listening to music among non-listeners/listeners. Second, sound without lyrics (e.g., pop music without lyrics or white noise) was not included as one level of music type. Future study can compare reading comprehension performance differences between sound without lyrics group and music with lyrics/no music group to explore the various effects of sound. Third, questions about what music genres participants listen to and their relative frequencies were not included in the researcher-designed questionnaire of background music listening habits. The questionnaire needs to be modified, and should include questions on music genres in future study. Fourth, music type should be manipulated as a within-subject factor instead of a between-subject factor in future study. Finally, this is a behavioral experiment examining music lyrics effects on reading comprehension. With the aim of obtaining the brain and neuroscience evidence to support the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, future studies could explore differences in brain and neural activities when students complete reading comprehension while listening to L1/L2 music, and identify the precise locus of the interference-by-process and attentional capture. These differences may indicate that interference-by-process and attentional capture obtain the functional support of different brain regions which further supports duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

4.6 Implications

The current study benefits from several strengths. It is the first study to explore effects of L1 or L2 music lyrics on L1/L2 reading comprehension performance among Chinese college students with different listening habits. For reading comprehension with L1/L2, L1/L2 reading comprehension performance reduced more when the music lyrics language was the same as the written texts. For example, L2 reading performance decreased more when both lyrics and written texts language is L2. In general, for average reading comprehension performance, music with native language lyrics affected it negatively more than L2 music/no music. The current study provided experimental evidence to support the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, and revealed that the duplex-mechanism account can also be applied to auditory distraction of reading comprehension tasks other than serial short-term tasks. The novelty of our study is to distinguish effects of lyrics with native language/s language on L1/L2 reading comprehension. Reading performance difference in lyrics with L1/L2 conditions suggests that auditory distraction has two functionally distinct forms: interference-by-process and attentional capture. The contribution of our research is that choosing music and written texts with L1/L2 helps methodically separate the potential individual contributions of interference-by-process and attentional capture to the overall disruption of task performance.

Our other findings were that reading comprehension performance was reduced by pop music lyrics. In addition, non-listeners were more distracted by lyrics than listeners. These findings have practical implications. Though most college students love pop music, and they usually report that listening to music while studying is beneficial, for college students and educators, it is better not to play pop music with lyrics while students, especially students without music-listening habits, are reading articles whether in their native languages or a second language.

5 Conclusion

The present study is an important first step in examining the effects of music with L1 or L2 lyrics on L1/L2 reading comprehension performance among Chinese college students with different listening habits. By using a 3-factor mixed factorial experimental design, we showed that the results verified our hypotheses. Specifically, the key findings are: (1) reading comprehension performance was negatively affected by music with lyrics compared to the no music condition; (2) L1/L2 reading comprehension was more affected by music in the same language as the texts; (3) Non-listeners were more negatively affected by music with lyrics than listeners; (4) For both non-listener and listeners, average reading comprehension accuracy rates are the lowest in the condition of music with native language lyrics. These findings support the claim that college students’ reading performance suffers when they listen to pop music with lyrics compared to no music, and provide experimental evidence support for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics statement

The studies involving humans were approved by Research Ethics Committee of Shandong Sport University. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author contributions

YS: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. CS: Funding acquisition, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. CL: Methodology, Writing – review & editing. XS: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. QL: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. HL: Methodology, Writing – review & editing.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by Shandong University undergraduate teaching reform (grant numbers: 2023Y251; 2023YJJGND07) and undergraduate teaching reform in Shandong province (grant number: Z2022096).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Pamela Holt for useful discussions and critically reading the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: reading comprehension, study habits, pop music with lyrics, native language lyrics, second language lyrics, written text language, Chinese college students

Citation: Sun Y, Sun C, Li C, Shao X, Liu Q and Liu H (2024) Impact of background music on reading comprehension: influence of lyrics language and study habits. Front. Psychol . 15:1363562. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1363562

Received: 13 January 2024; Accepted: 25 March 2024; Published: 05 April 2024.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2024 Sun, Sun, Li, Shao, Liu and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Chuanning Sun, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Specific Reading Comprehension Disability: Major Problem, Myth, or Misnomer?

The goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension. Participants in the study were first, second, and third graders, totaling 9 cohorts and over 425,000 participants in all. The pattern of results was consistent across all cohorts: Less than one percent of first- through third-grade students who scored as poor in reading comprehension were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.

According to the most recently released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, poor reading comprehension is rampant in the United States. A basic level of proficiency is defined as having “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade” ( NAEP, 2011 , p. 6.). In the US, nearly one in every three fourth-grade students and one in four eighth-grade students is below even this basic level. Only about one out of three students score at the proficient or advanced levels at either grade.

Reading comprehension, which has been defined as gaining an understanding of written text through a process of extracting and constructing meaning ( RAND, 2002 ), is perhaps the one of the most essential academic skills ( Nash & Snowling, 2006 ; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000 ). Although difficulty in decoding the words on a page is a frequent cause of reading comprehension problems, between 10 and 15% of children experience poor comprehension despite maintaining normal levels of reading accuracy and fluency ( Stothard & Hulme, 1995 ; Yuill & Oakhill, 1991).

One explanation of poor reading comprehension despite normal levels of reading accuracy and fluency is provided by the simple view of reading ( Gough & Tumner, 1986 ; Hoover & Gough, 1990 ), which asserts that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and oral language comprehension skills. According to the simple view of reading, poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding would be attributed to a problem with oral language.

Relations between decoding, oral language, and reading comprehension have been extensively studied, with decoding and oral language explaining unique variance in reading comprehension (e.g., Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009 ). For example, Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, and van den Broek (2008) investigated relations among inference-generation, language skills, vocabulary, and comprehension skills across different media (i.e., television, audio, and written modalities) in a longitudinal study of two cohorts of children 4 to 6 years old and 6 to 8 years old. Their findings indicated that inference-making skills generalized across different media and were highly correlated with reading comprehension; however, children’s inference-making skills were inconsistently related to vocabulary and not at all related to other language skills—including word identification. These findings are consistent with other investigations ( Kendeou, Lynch, van den Broek, Espin, White, & Kremer, 2005 ) and suggest that although decoding and oral language skills are highly correlated with reading comprehension, their development is independent.

Reading comprehension disability, a term than has been used to describe readers who struggle with reading comprehension, has been operationally defined in at least four ways: (a) a discrepancy between reading comprehension and word-level decoding ( Nation & Snowling, 1998 ; Oakhill, Yuill, & Parkin, 1986 ), (b) discrepancies between reading comprehension and both decoding and chronological age ( Cain, 2003 , 2006 ; Cain & Oakhill, 1999 , 2000 , 2006 , 2011 ; Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004 ; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000 ; Cain, Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001 ; Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005 ; Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, & Holliday, 2008 ; Yuill & Oakhill, 1988 ); (c) a discrepancy between reading comprehension and decoding and the requirement that decoding be in the normal range ( Cataldo & Oakhill, 2000 ), or (d) just scoring below a given percentile on a measure of reading comprehension ( Locascio, Mahone, Eason, & Cutting, 2010 ; Sesma, Mahone, Levin, Eason, & Cutting, 2009 ).

Another way to characterize the landscape of reading problems is using a classification system for types of readers adapted from Catts, Adlof, and Weismer (2006) . This classification system, which is presented in Table 1 , represents an application of the simple view of reading to reading problems. Adequate readers are characterized by good decoding and comprehension. Poor readers, sometimes referred to as garden-variety poor readers in the research literature ( Stanovich, 1988 ), are characterized by poor decoding and comprehension. Dyslexia or specific reading disability is characterized by poor decoding but with good comprehension. Specific comprehension disability is characterized by poor comprehension but with good decoding. Students who fall in the quadrant labeled specific comprehension disability were of primary interest in the present study.

Classification of Types of Good and Poor Readers

Specifically, the goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension.

Three Competing Hypotheses of Reading Comprehension Disability

Hypothesis 1.

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding have comprehension problems that are largely specific to reading. Support for this hypothesis comes from studies that reported minimal or no deficits in vocabulary for students with poor reading comprehension ( Cain, 2006 ; Nation, Cocksey, Taylor, & Bishop, 2010 ). One challenge for this hypothesis is that it is difficult to identify a theory of reading that would explain comprehension deficits that are specific only to reading comprehension, as opposed to also affecting oral language comprehension. Although it is conceivable that highly skilled readers such as experienced editors or proof-readers might rely on expertise that has been acquired over the years and is relatively domain specific (Wagner & Stanovich, 1986), this would not seem to be the case for school-age readers. Another difficulty faced by this hypothesis is the substantial body of evidence that individuals who are poor in reading comprehension have various deficits in oral language. We consider this evidence in discussing the second hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding have comprehension problems that are general to oral language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Support for this hypothesis comes from the extensive literature that reports poor performance on a wide variety of measures of oral language for students who are poor at reading comprehension ( Cain & Oakhill, 2006 ; Cain & Oakhill, 2011 ; Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004 ; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006 ; Clark et al., 2010; Nation, Clarke, Marshall, & Durand, 2004 ; Nation & Norbury, 2005 ; Nation & Snowling, 1997 , 1998 , 2004 ; Nation, Snowling, & Clarke, 2007 ; Ricketts, Bishop, & Nation, 2008 ; Sesma et al., 2009 ; Snowling & Hulme, 2012 ; Stothard & Hulme, 1992 , 1995 ). For example, Nation and Snowling (1997) reported that students with poor reading comprehension had difficulty answering questions about a passage regardless of whether there were asked to read the passage or the passage was read to them. The simple view of reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986 ; Hoover & Gough, 1990 ) provides a theoretical rationale for this hypothesis. It states that individual differences in reading comprehension are determined by the interaction of individual differences in word recognition and oral language comprehension.

Hypothesis 3

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding represent a mixture of students, many with comprehension problems that are general to oral language and reading but at least some with comprehension problems that are specific to reading. Support for the existence of students whose comprehension problems are general to oral language as well as reading comes from the literature just cited that describes poor performance on various oral language tasks for students with poor reading comprehension. Support for the possible existence of students whose comprehension problems are specific to reading comes from a study of students who were poor at reading comprehension by Catts et al. (2006) . The sample from this study was taken from a larger epidemiologic study of language impairments in children ( Tomblin et al., 1997 ). This made it possible to determine what percentage of the students identified by Catts et al. for their poor reading comprehension met criteria for either specific language impairment (SLI) or nonspecific language impairment (NLI). Criteria for SLI required scoring more than 1.25 standard deviations below the mean on at least two of five language composite scores (vocabulary, grammar, narration, receptive language, expressive language); criteria for NLI added the requirement of a Performance IQ more than 1 standard deviation below the mean ( Tomblin et al., 1997 ). The results were that only a third of the sample of children with poor reading comprehension met criteria for either SLI or NLI. Similar rates of language impairment for children who were poor at reading comprehension were reported by Nation et al., (2004) .

We are not aware of any previous study that is capable of distinguishing these three hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension. It is true that the overwhelming evidence of problems in oral language in children with poor reading comprehension pretty much rules out hypothesis one (i.e., their comprehension problems are specific to reading comprehension). But these studies, which either showed mean differences in oral language skills for students who were good or poor at reading comprehension, or correlations between oral language skills and reading comprehension, cannot distinguish hypotheses two (i.e., comprehension problems are general) and three (i.e., a mixture of general and reading-specific comprehension problems exists). A significant mean difference can be achieved either by a difference that occurs for all members of a sample, or by a difference that occurs for many but not all members of the sample. A significant correlation indicates a group relation between two variables, but does not rule out the existence of a sub-group for whom the overall correlation does not hold.

Being able to distinguish between these three hypotheses has practical implications. For example, if students with poor reading comprehension tend to have comprehension problems that are specific to reading (Hypothesis 1), classroom instruction and/or intervention for these students should focus more on remediating text-based reading skills (e.g., decoding) whereas if students with poor reading comprehension tend to have comprehension problems that are not specific to reading but general to oral language (Hypothesis 2), instruction and intervention would be better suited to target language skills (e.g., oral vocabulary) as opposed to skills that are more specific to text comprehension. In essence, distinguishing the core features of reading comprehension disability would provide teachers with a means of identifying which skills instruction and/or intervention practices should focus on to result in greater gains in student achievement. For students whose comprehension problems are general to reading and oral language, remediation should address language problems that are at a comparably general level. If there are students whose comprehension problems are specific to reading comprehension, a different approach to remediation would be required.

The present study used a large-scale database to address the question of the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension in first, second, and third grades. We approached the data with several specific questions in mind: (1) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension in first, second, and third grades? (2) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension yet maintain adequate levels of decoding? and (3) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension and adequate levels of decoding and who also have adequate vocabulary knowledge?

We first identified students who were poor at reading comprehension. Then we determined how many students who were poor at reading comprehension were at least adequate in decoding. Finally, we determined how many students with poor reading comprehension and at least adequate decoding were also at least adequate in the oral language skill of vocabulary. We did this at three grades because of the likelihood that the task of reading comprehension changes over the first few grades of formal schooling.

Participants

Participants represented a cross-sectional study consisting of three cohorts (2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06 school years) of first (N = 143,672), second (N = 135,943), and third grade students (N = 144,815) attending Reading First schools in Florida. There were slightly more males (52 percent) than females (48 percent). The sample was diverse, with 41 percent white, 32 percent black, 21 percent Hispanic, 4 percent mixed, and 1 percent Hispanic. Approximately 75 percent of participants received free or reduced lunch, and 17 percent were identified as having limited English proficiency. The participants’ data were obtained from the state of Florida’s Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network (PMRN), which was created to monitor the performance of students in the state’s Reading First schools. Reading First was a large, federally funded initiative designed to improve the reading performance of students in high-poverty kindergarten, second-, and third-grade classrooms who were at risk for reading problems. On average, Reading First schools also tended to have lower student achievement. Although the PMRN primarily consists of students from Reading First schools, a small number of non-Reading First schools that voluntarily reported their data were also included in the database.

The Stanford Achievement Test served as a general measure of comprehension and was administered to all participants across the three grades. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed for first and second graders using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task; decoding was assessed using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. For third graders, the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test measured vocabulary and decoding skills.

Stanford Achievement Test – Reading Comprehension

The Stanford Achievement Test, Tenth Edition (SAT-10; Harcourt Educational Measurement, 2003 ) is a group-administered multiple-choice standardized assessment that measures critical reading components including reading comprehension. Reading comprehension was assessed by having students read passages and then answer multiple-choice questions about the passages. Passage questions emphasize a variety of skills, including initial understanding (i.e., explicit comprehension), interpretation (i.e., implicit comprehension), and critical analysis (i.e., a synthesis and evaluation of explicit and implicit information) ( Florida Department of Education, 2006 ). The SAT-10 has well-established psychometric properties ( Harcourt & Brace, 2004 ).

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – Receptive Vocabulary

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997 ) is an individually-administered test of receptive vocabulary. Participants were instructed to match a spoken word with one of four presented pictures. Alternate-form reliability exceeds .88 and criterion-related validity coefficients with reading range from .69 to .91 ( Williams & Wang, 1997 ).

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills –Nonsense Word Fluency

The Nonword Fluency (NWF) subtest of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills – Sixth Edition (DIBELS; Good & Kaminsky, 2002 ) is a set of 60 single-syllable pseudo-words (e.g., jav) with short vowel sounds. Examinees are asked to read them aloud, and their score was the number of correct pronunciations in a one-minute time interval. Alternate-form reliability exceeds .8 and criterion-related validity coefficients with reading range from .4 to .9 ( Speece et al., 2003 ; Good et al., 2004 ).

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test – Reading Vocabulary

The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test – Fourth Edition (GMRT-4; MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2000 ) is a group-administered standardized assessment that was used to measure reading vocabulary in the third grade sample. Participants were provided with a word embedded in text that was minimally suggestive as to not reveal meaning and were required to select the word or sentence that means the same as the test word. Kuder-Richardson reliability values are high for both forms of the assessment (K-R 20 = .91 – .96; MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2008 ).

Trained school- and district-level assessment teams administered all measures, and no classroom teachers were involved in the assessment process. The assessments were administered during April and May, near the end of the school year.

Results and Discussion

A three-step procedure was used to analyze each cohort and grade. The first step was to identify students who were poor at reading comprehension according to the operational definition of scoring at or below the 5 th percentile on SAT-10 Reading Comprehension. The 5 th percentile was chosen to identify students with relatively severe problems in reading comprehension. The second step was to identify students who were poor at reading comprehension but adequate in decoding. The procedure we used for the second step was different for the third-grade cohorts compared to both the first- and second-grade cohorts. For first and second grade, identified students who were flagged in step one because of poor reading comprehension who also scored at or above the 25 th percentile on DIBELS NWF met the criterion for being poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding. The third and final step was to identify the students who were flagged in step 2 as poor at reading comprehension although adequate in decoding who also were adequate in vocabulary, as determined by scoring at or above the 25 th percentile on the PPVT. At third grade, Gates-MacGinitie Reading Vocabulary served the dual role of a measure of vocabulary and of decoding. Consequently, the second and third steps used for first and second grade were replaced by a single step in third grade of identifying students who were poor at reading comprehension yet who scored at or above the 25 th percentile on Reading Vocabulary.

We recognize that our choice of the 5 th and 25 th percentiles is somewhat arbitrary. We chose a lenient criterion (i.e., 25 th percentile) of adequate decoding and vocabulary to maximize our sensitivity to detect students who were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding and vocabulary. To determine the extent to which the pattern of results was sensitive to the specific percentiles used, we carried out analyses using other percentile ranks (e.g., poor reading comprehension defined by scoring at or below the 10 th percentile, and adequate decoding and vocabulary defined by scoring at or above the 40 th percentile). We found that the overall pattern of results was remarkably similar.

Results are presented in Table 2 . Across the three first-grade cohorts, roughly 3 to 5 percent of students met the criterion for having poor reading comprehension. This makes sense given that our criterion was scoring at or below the 5 th percentile. Less than 1 percent of first-grade students scored both below the 5 th percentile in reading comprehension and above the 25 th percentile in decoding. This indicates that decoding is an important limiting factor on reading comprehension in first grade. Finally, only approximately 0.1 percent of the sample was poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, a result that replicated across the three cohorts.

Frequencies and Percentages of Types of Poor Readers for Three Grades

For the three second-grade cohorts, there was one immediate difference in the results for second grade compared to first grade. Whereas nearly all first-grade students who were poor in reading comprehension were also poor in decoding, approximately half of the second-grade students who were poor at reading comprehension were adequate in decoding. However, when the additional criterion of being adequate in vocabulary was applied, the results were identical. Less than one percent of the sample was poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, and this result was replicated across the three cohorts.

Turning to third grade, because of the combined second and third steps required by the use of Reading Vocabulary as a measure of both vocabulary and decoding, we cannot separate students who are adequate in decoding from those who were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Again, the results were remarkably similar. Less than one percent of the sample was poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, and this result was replicated across the three cohorts.

We converted our percentages to proportions to calculate standard errors and then converted back to percentages. The purpose for doing so was to provide standard errors (i.e., estimates of how much variability would be expected over repeated random sampling from the same population) for our estimates of the percentage of readers who are poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Combining the three first-grade cohorts, only 0.12 percent of the sample was poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. The standard error was 0.01 percent, yielding a confidence interval from 0.11 to 0.13 percent. Comparable values for second and third grade were 0.17 (0.16-0.18) and 0.21 (0.20-0.22) percent respectively. Combining all grades and cohorts yielded an overall percentage of 0.17 (0.16-0.18).

General Discussion

The pattern of results was clear across nine cohorts and three grades, totaling more than 425,000 students in all. Well under one percent of first- through third-grade students were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at both decoding and vocabulary.

Returning to our three hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension, the results provide support for the hypothesis that the comprehension problem of early elementary students who are poor at reading comprehension tend to have deficits in oral language (i.e., vocabulary knowledge). The hypothesis that students with poor reading comprehension are a mix of individuals, some of whom have comprehension problems that result from limited oral language skills and others of whom have comprehension problems that are specific to reading, was not supported based on the fact that well below one percent of students who were poor at reading comprehension turned out to be adequate at both decoding and vocabulary.

Beginning in second grade, there is evidence of a mixture of different types of students with poor reading comprehension, but the mixture does not concern whether comprehension problems extend to both oral language and reading. Rather, the mixture is of students who are poor at reading comprehension and poor at decoding or poor at reading comprehension despite being adequate at decoding. This result is consistent with evidence from other studies that the transition from first to second grade is marked by a greater influence of oral language skills on reading comprehension ( Kim, Wagner, & Lopez, 2012 ).

Our results suggest that students with poor reading comprehension who are adequate decoders really have language comprehension problems in the form of poor vocabulary knowledge. We did not have other measures of oral language so we cannot determine whether the oral language problems of the students in our sample extended beyond vocabulary knowledge. However, evidence from other studies suggests that this might be the case. Catts et al. (2006) reported that one third of their students who were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding met eligibility criteria for language impairment. In addition, they indicated that students who did not meet eligibility for language impairment still had sub-clinical levels of poor language skills. In fact, their poor reading comprehension group scored at the 20 th percentile on vocabulary and at the 30 th percentile in grammatical understanding on average. Similar results were reported by Nation et al. (2004) . Both Catts et al. and Nation et al. speculated that sub-clinical levels of language impairment, which they referred to as hidden language impairments because they do not meet typical eligibility criteria, could by themselves, or in combination with other processing deficits, play an important role in reading comprehension difficulties.

Cain and Oakhill (2009) reviewed the literature for three kinds of studies with causal implications about the origin of reading comprehension problems: comprehension-age matched comparison studies, training studies, and longitudinal correlational studies. They concluded that there is evidence for causal influences on reading comprehension for inference making, comprehension monitoring, and understanding story structures. It is unlikely that limitations in inference making, comprehension monitoring, or understanding story structure are specific to reading. Hulme and Snowling (2011) commented, “In our view, many of these other putative causes may reduce to basic limitations in oral language comprehension, which are the direct cause of these children’s reading comprehension difficulties” (p. 141).

Our results are consistent with the simple view of reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986 ; Hoover & Gough, 1990 ) in that nearly all cases of poor reading comprehension were associated with inadequate decoding, oral language (i.e., vocabulary), or both. Our results also support Catt’s et al.’s (2006) recommendation to use a framework based on the simple view (see Table 1 ) when assessing and intervening with poor readers. When assessing poor readers, it is important to target oral language and decoding in addition to reading connected text for meaning because students’ poor reading comprehension scores alone are not sufficiently informative for the purposes of remediation. It would be important to identify how much of the poor reading comprehension is attributable to poor decoding and to poor oral language skills such as limited vocabulary knowledge.

It is also important to consider developmental differences. Because of the nature of early reading and early reading comprehension assessments, it is likely that students in first grade who are poor in reading comprehension will also be poor in word recognition. It also is the case that difficulty decoding the words on the page is a profound limitation on reading comprehension. However, it is important to assess oral language as well as decoding because although poor decoding may be a limiting factor on reading comprehension, unaddressed deficits in oral language skills for students who have them will limit their reading comprehension even if their decoding skills improve upon intervention. Given this, students with reading comprehension disability would benefit from interventions that incorporate components of reading fluency (i.e., activities requiring simultaneous decoding and text comprehension) ( NICHD, 2000 ) in addition to components of oral language like vocabulary, semantics, and syntactic understanding (i.e., grammar) ( Snow, Burns, & Griffith, 1998 ).

It is important to acknowledge several limitations of our study. The population from which our sample was drawn was from Reading First schools. These schools served a larger percentage of low SES students than typical public schools in the US. It is important to replicate this study with samples drawn from non-Reading First schools. Second, our measures were relatively brief and our measure of oral language comprehension was limited to receptive vocabulary. Third, comprehension abilities in the early grades (e.g., first grade) are often assessed using an oral-format as opposed to a written format as used in the present study (i.e., SAT-10) because with a text-based measure, it is difficult to determine whether students are doing poorly because they do not comprehend the passage or because they are unable to read the question. Further, it is important to replicate this study using a broader array or oral language skills to better determine the extensiveness of the oral language comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in decoding.

In conclusion, although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant P50 HD052120 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.

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Apple Researchers Reveal New AI System That Can Beat GPT-4

Apple researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system named ReALM (Reference Resolution as Language Modeling) that aims to radically enhance how voice assistants understand and respond to commands.

Reference resolution is an important part of natural language understanding, enabling users to use pronouns and other indirect references in conversation without confusion. For digital assistants, this capability has historically been a significant challenge, limited by the need to interpret a wide range of verbal cues and visual information. Apple's ReALM system seeks to address this by converting the complex process of reference resolution into a pure language modeling problem. In doing so, it can comprehend references to visual elements displayed on a screen and integrate this understanding into the conversational flow.

ReALM reconstructs the visual layout of a screen using textual representations. This involves parsing on-screen entities and their locations to generate a textual format that captures the screen's content and structure. Apple researchers found that this strategy, combined with specific fine-tuning of language models for reference resolution tasks, significantly outperforms traditional methods, including the capabilities of OpenAI's GPT-4.

ReALM could enable users to interact with digital assistants much more efficiently with reference to what is currently displayed on their screen without the need for precise, detailed instructions. This has the potential to make voice assistants much more useful in a variety of settings, such as helping drivers navigate infotainment systems while driving or assisting users with disabilities by providing an easier and more accurate means of indirect interaction.

Apple has now published several AI research papers. Last month, the company revealed a new method for training large language models that seamlessly integrates both text and visual information. Apple is widely expected to unveil an array of AI features at WWDC in June.

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Top Rated Comments

enabling users to use pronouns and other indirect references in conversation without confusion.

It's good if AI understands "Can you repeat that?" properly. /thread

[HEADING=2]Apple Researchers Reveal[/HEADING]

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