Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 29(1), 1016

2014 The Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children


C

A Cognitive View of Reading Comprehension: Implications for Reading

Difficulties
Panayiota Kendeou
University of Minnesota

Paul van den Broek, Anne Helder, and Josefine Karlsson

Leiden University
Our aim in the present paper is to discuss a cognitive view of reading comprehension, with
particular attention to research findings that have the potential to improve our understanding
of difficulties in reading comprehension. We provide an overview of how specific sources of
difficulties in inference making, executive functions, and attention allocation influence reading
comprehension processes and outcomes and may lead to reading comprehension problems.
Finally, we discuss how the consideration of these potential sources of difficulty have practical
implications for the design and selection of instructional materials.

INTRODUCTION
Despite intensive instruction, many children and adolescents
fail to reach functional levels of reading comprehension.
Reading comprehension is essential for success in life and
can be broadly defined as understanding, using, reflecting
on and engaging with written texts, in order to achieve ones
goals, to develop ones knowledge and potential, and to participate in society (OECD, 1999, p. 22). The importance
of reading comprehension is also reflected in the extensive
and impressive knowledge base that has been established in
the fields of psychology, education, and cognitive sciences
(RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). Our aim in this article is to discuss a cognitive view of reading comprehension, with particular attention to research findings that have
the potential to improve our understanding of difficulties in
reading literacy as well as educational practice for struggling
readers.
We first present and discuss a cognitive view of reading
comprehension. We then discuss developmental and individual differences in three core cognitive processes that may
fail in a struggling reader and thus are common sources of
reading comprehension difficulties. Finally, we discuss implications of the cognitive view for educational practice with
the aim to improve reading comprehension performance by
struggling readers.
READING COMPREHENSION: A COGNITIVE
VIEW
How do we understand what we read? Reading comprehension depends on the execution and integration of many cogniRequests for reprints should be sent to Panayiota Kendeou, University
of Minnesota. Electronic inquiries should be sent to [email protected].

tive processes (Kendeou & Trevors, 2012; van den Broek &
Espin, 2012; van den Broek, Rapp, & Kendeou, 2005). To understand a sentence, one must visually process the individual
words, identify and access their phonological, orthographic,
and semantic representations, and connect these representations to form an understanding of the underlying meaning of
the sentence. Similarly, to comprehend a text as a whole, the
reader needs to process and connect individual idea units,
resulting (if all goes well) in the construction of a coherent
mental representation of the text. For these processes to be
successful, many factors play a role, including reader characteristics, text properties, and the demands of the reading task
(Lorch & van den Broek, 1997; van den Broek & Kremer,
1999).
The complexity of reading comprehension is captured in
theoretical models that describe the cognitive and linguistic
processes involved. Some models focus on the mental representation that readers construct as a result of the process
of understanding words, sentences, and their respective relations within a text1 (McNamara & Magliano, 2009), whereas
others focus on the developmental trajectories of various processes and skills central to reading comprehension (e.g., the
Simple View of Reading; Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Although
the various theoretical models emphasize different aspects of
reading comprehension, they share the central notion that, at
its core, reading comprehension involves the construction of
a coherent mental representation of the text in the readers
memory. This mental representation of the text includes textual information and associated background knowledge interconnected via semantic relations (e.g., causal, referential,
and spatial relations). Semantic relations are identified by
the reader through passive and strategic inferential processes
(Kintsch, 1988; van den Broek et al., 2005). The passive inferential processes take place automatically but the strategic
processes demand readers attentional and working memory
resources. In turn, attentional and working memory resources

LEARNING DISABILITIES RESEARCH

are influenced by the readers standards of coherence, that is,

the level of understanding that a reader aims to achieve during reading (van den Broek, Lorch, Linderholm & Gustafson,
2001; van den Broek, Risden, & Husebye-Hartmann,
1995).
The outcome of reading comprehension is a mental representation of the text in the form of a semantic network
(see Figure 1, McMaster, Espin, & van den Broek, this issue), but its construction occurs moment-by-moment as the
reader proceeds through the text. Distinguishing between the
product and processes of reading comprehension is important because it is through the process that such a product is
constructed and its quality is determined. With every new
piece of information that a reader encounters while reading
a text, a new combination of cognitive processes is executed.
To engage in the right process at the right time is essential
for successful reading comprehension. Therefore, it is important to understand where the cognitive processes may fail for
struggling comprehenders and how we can positively influence these processes. Indeed, reading comprehension interventions frequently implicitly or explicitly propose activities
designed to influence processing and thereby alter the product of reading (Rapp, van den Broek, McMaster, Kendeou,
& Espin, 2007).
The cognitive processes of reading comprehension roughly fall into two categories: (1) lower level processes that
involve translating the written code into meaningful language
units and, (2) higher level processes that involve combining
these units into a meaningful and coherent mental representation. With respect to lower level processes, there is general consensus that comprehension of text depends heavily
on decoding (Perfetti, 1985), reading fluency (Fuchs, Fuchs,
Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001), and vocabulary knowledge (Nagy,
Herman, & Anderson, 1985). With respect to higher level
processes, research consistently has demonstrated the critical
role of inference making, which enables a reader to connect
one part of the text to other parts of the text and to background knowledge (van den Broek, 1997), executive function
processes such as the ability to organize and reflect on information within the limits of a readers working memory capacity (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Sesma, Mahone, Levine,
Eason, & Cutting, 2009), and attentionallocation abilities
such as selective attention and comprehension monitoring
(Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005) which enable a reader to
focus on central or relevant aspects of the text.
Both lower level and higher level processes of reading
comprehension begin to develop before reading education
starts and they independently predict reading comprehension ability at a later age (Kendeou, van den Broek, White,
& Lynch, 2009). Lower level processes such as decoding
undergo tremendous changes in early childhood and typically become more automated during the first grades of
elementary school (Kendeou, Papadopoulos, & Spanoudis,
2012). Automatization of these lower level processes leaves
more mental resources available for higher level processes of
reading comprehension (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Higher level
processes become automated more slowly and go through
considerable developmental changes from early childhood
into adulthood (Luna, Garver, Urban, Lazar, & Sweeney,
2004)

11

SOURCES OF INDIVIDUAL AND

DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES
When a child is repeatedly unsuccessful in comprehending
texts that he/she has read, this suggests reading difficulties
at the processing level. These difficulties can manifest themselves in various ways: failure to recall the main points of
a story, failure to answer literal and/or inferential questions,
failure to complete the actual reading of the text, and so
on. These failures may be due to deficits in lower level processes that involve translating the written code into meaningful language units (e.g., phonological processes, decoding
processes, etc.), to higher level processes that involve combining these units into a meaningful and coherent mental
representation (e.g. inferential processes, executive function
processes, attentionallocation abilities), or both. Approaching the issue of reading difficulties at the level of specific
processing difficulties offers an important advantage: It can
inform the design or selection of appropriate instructional
materials and interventions to remediate the source of the
difficulty (McMaster et al., 2012; Rapp et al., 2007). Indeed,
remedial plans are likely to be most effective if they are
based on a solid understanding of the possible sources of
failure (Gersten, Keating, Yovanoff, & Harniss, 2001).
On the one hand, comprehension by readers with difficulties predominantly in lower level processes suffers because these processes exhaust attentional and working memory resources and because the meaningful message (i.e., the
translation from written code to meaning) is inadequate and
presents inaccurate or incomplete input to the higher level
processes. On the other hand, readers with weaknesses predominately in higher level processes such as inference making, executive function skills, and attentionallocation abilities have difficulty identifying semantic connections between
text units, identifying connections between the text and their
prior knowledge, identifying the important or main ideas in a
text, and monitoring their comprehension (Helder, Van Leijenhorst, Beker, & Van den Broek, 2013). For these readers,
comprehension is compromised at the level of combining
language units into a meaningful and coherent mental representation; even if the construction of a mental representation
of the text is possible, it is likely that the quality of the
representation suffers significantly. In this article, we focus
on struggling readers who have particular difficulties with
higher level processes such as inference making, executive
functions, and attentionallocation abilities. It is important
to note that these three processes influence, and are being
influenced by each other but for pedagogical purposes we
are discussing each independently of one another.
Inference Making
One source of reading comprehension problems concerns
the ability to generate inferences. Inferences allow the reader
to construct meaningful connections between text elements
and relevant background knowledge and therefore are crucial to comprehension (Oakhill, Cain, & Bryant, 2003; van
den Broek, 1990). The development of inference making
skills begins at a young age, well before formal reading

12

KENDEOU ET AL.: COGNITIVE MODEL OF READING

education starts (Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, White, & van den

Broek, 2008; van den Broek, 1989). As children become
older, the inferences they generate change in both their quantity and quality. For example, with development children increasingly generate inferences that connect larger text units
such as paragraphs, event episodes, and sections, rather than
just inferences that connect individual events and facts within
an episode or section. Also, they increasingly infer abstract
connections (e.g., between themes, to characters feelings)
in addition to concrete connections (van den Broek, 1997;
van den Broek et al., 2005). As a result, with age and experience, children identify a greater number and wider variety
of semantic connections during reading.
Readers who are weak in making inferences almost inevitably fail to comprehend all but the simplest texts, because
they are unable to identify important connections that lend
coherence to their text representations. Such weakness may
result in difficulty recognizing the proper referential connections that indicate that an object or person referred to in one
sentence is identical to that in another sentence (Long, Oppy,
& Seely, 1994; Oakhill & Yuill, 1996), Inference difficulties also manifest themselves in problems making inferences
that fill conceptual gaps between the clauses, sentences, and
paragraphs in a text (Magliano, Wiemer-Hastings, Millis,

MuNoz,
& McNamara, 2002; Oakhill, Yuill, & Donaldson,
1990). Even when a reader is capable of making such inferences, weakness may result if the reader adopts standards
of coherence that do not fit the goal of reading the text and,
hence, makes insufficient or inadequate inferences (van den
Broek, Bohn-Gettler, Kendeou, Carlson, & White, 2011).
Finally, weakness in inferential ability may result when the
reader lacks the background knowledge necessary for important inferences (Cook, Limber, & OBrien, 2001). This background knowledge includes both content knowledge (e.g.,
when a ball hits a window, the window is likely to break)
and knowledge about text structures (e.g., narratives usually begin with a setting and problem and end with some
resolution; different types of informational texts have different structures; see Duke (2004). Readers who experience
difficulty in inferring important connections, in applying
the proper standards of coherence, or who lack background
knowledge are likely to construct impoverished representations of the texts they read and, as a result, fail to grasp their
meaning.
Executive Functions
A second source of reading comprehension problems concerns a readers executive functions. Executive functions refer
to cognitive processes that regulate and control our behavior
while performing a particular task (Diamond, 2013; Miyaki
et al., 2000). Two important executive functions are working memory and inhibition. Working memory enables the
reader to maintain information while processing incoming
information, making it possible for the reader to integrate
the two pieces of information (Baddeley, 2003; Daneman &
Carpenter, 1980; Swanson & OConnor, 2009). Inhibition
enables suppression of irrelevant information, and thus determines which information to maintain in active memory.

Individual differences in working memory result in differences in reading comprehension in adults and predict reading
comprehension skills in children over and above lower level
skills (Cain et al., 2004; Sesma et al., 2009). Working memory capacity increases during the elementary school years
(Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge, & Wearing, 2004) into
adolescence and adulthood (Luna et al., 2004). Readers with
low working-memory capacity experience numerous constraints on how much information they can keep active as
they read, resulting in lower comprehension and recall performance (Just & Carpenter, 1992; Linderholm & van den
Broek, 2002). The ability to keep information active is essential to inference generation and to a readers ability to
reflect on his or her understanding (or lack of understanding)
of the text (Engle & Conway, 1998). Therefore, weakness in
working memory results in inadequate inference making and
comprehension monitoring. Likewise, weaknesses in other
executive functions have been found to contribute to reading
comprehension problems. For example, readers with deficits
in executive function skills demonstrate difficulties in planning and organizing (Locascio, Mahone, Eason, & Cutting,
2010) which, in turn, impede reading comprehension, particularly when the text at hand is complex and long (Eason,
Goldberg, Young, Geist, & Cutting, 2012). These readers are
less efficient in applying reading strategies when those are
needed for comprehension.
Individual differences in inhibition also result in differences in reading comprehension. Indeed, good inhibition skills relate to good comprehension and vice versa
(Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991). For example, to successfully
create a coherent representation of a text, a reader must maintain in active memory the most important information while
being able to inhibit less important information. Children
with poor reading comprehension skills show difficulty eliminating information that is no longer relevant in both shortterm memory tasks and working memory tasks (Cain, 2006).
Specifically, when children are instructed to ignore certain
words during reading, children with poor inhibition skills fail
to do so, and are more likely to remember the to-be-ignored
words than children with good inhibition skills.
In summary, weaknesses in executive functions such as
working memory and inhibition may seriously hamper the
readers ability to perform the cognitive processes necessary
for adequate comprehension.
Attention Allocation
A third source of reading comprehension problems concerns
attentionallocation ability, the ability to adapt attentional
and processing resources to the demands of the task at hand
(Liu, Reichle, & Gao, 2013). As children develop and become more proficient at reading, their ability to focus on
structurally central aspects of the text becomes more selective
and more efficient (van den Broek, 1989). This developing
sensitivity to structural centrality is reflected in better allocation of attention to structurally central information during
the processing of the text and in a more prominent position
of this information in the mental representation of a text (van
den Broek, Helder, & Van Leijenhorst, 2013).

LEARNING DISABILITIES RESEARCH

Children with attentionallocation deficits may experience reading comprehension difficulties. Attention deficits
may impede readers comprehension monitoring, the ability
to evaluate ones level of comprehension of a text (McInnes,
Humphries, Hogg-Johnson, & Tannock, 2003). As a result,
readers with attention deficits are more susceptible to being
distracted by detail, especially when reading longer texts,
and fail to focus on main ideas (Long, Seely, & Oppy, 1997).
These readers have relative difficulty to detect coherence
breaks in texts, which ultimately may result in less coherent
mental representations of texts (Cain & Oakhill, 2007).
In summary, inferential ability and its components, executive functions such as working memory and inhibition,
and attention allocation are essential aspects of successful
comprehension. Weakness in each creates a source for comprehension difficulties. Although these are main sources of
difficulty, they are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.
Importantly, this means that struggling readers do not fit a
single, specific profile but rather exhibit diverse patterns of
weaknesses that influence each readers reading development
and performance in different ways (Cain & Oakhill, 2006;
Nation, Clarke, & Snowling, 2002).
IMPLICATIONS OF THE COGNITIVE VIEW FOR
PRACTICE IN EDUCATION
The cognitive view of reading comprehension has implications for describing, explaining, and addressing the needs of
struggling readers. In this section, we discuss several implications for readers who exhibit difficulties in higher level
processes, in particular as they pertain to the selection and
design of instructional materials and to the design of remedial
instruction.
A first set of implications pertains to the types of instructional materials we can use with struggling readers. One
such implication is that nonwritten media can be used to
foster skills that are important to reading comprehension.
Higher level processes such as inference making, executive
functions, and attentionallocation skills are recruited in similar ways during reading a text, listening to a text, or even
during a visual presentation of the narrative (Gernsbacher,
1991; Kendeou et al., 2005, 2007, 2008). This generalization
across media offers a unique opportunity for training higher
level skills in struggling readers. This is particularly the case
for readers who also have difficulty in lower level reading
processes because the use of different media preserves their
working memory resources (which would otherwise be expended on decoding) and allows them to engage in higher
level processes. Thus, the use of nonwritten media makes it
possible to teach comprehension processes and strategies to
a wide range of struggling readers at various verbal ability
levels and ages. For example, by using oral or televised stories instructors or specialists can teach children how to make
inferences about protagonists goals, actions, emotions, and
story themes. Teachers can also systematically direct childrens attention allocation to the important events in an oral
or televised story so they can develop childrens sensitivity
to structural centrality, while at the same time effectively
inhibiting less important information. As a final example, at-

13

tention allocation can be directed to potential inconsistencies

in the story line to develop better comprehension monitoring
skills. Recent initiatives in the field implementing such activities in the context of formal oral language interventions
in struggling or even prereaders show promise (Desmarais,
Nadeau, Trudeau, Filiatrault-Veilleux, & Max`es-Fournier,
2013; van den Broek, Kendeou, Lousberg, & Visser, 2011).
A second, related implication for instructional materials
is that it is useful to adapt texts according to their purpose.
For example, an important distinction is between texts used
to teach reading skills and texts used to teach content knowledge. On the one hand, if the purpose is to teach higher level
skills such as inference making then one should gradually
build up the difficulty level of the texts in terms of the demands on the inference processes. This should be done in a
systematic and logical order, for example by leaving various
types of connections in the text implicit for the reader to infer, gradually increasing the distance of the conceptual gaps
in the text, and so on. On the other hand, if the purpose is to
teach content (e.g., science, history) then one should design
the texts such that the demands on cognitive processes are
as minimal as possible, in particular those processes that are
involved in the sources of difficulty described above. This
can be done, for example, by putting important information
that needs to be connected in close proximity in the text and
by making implicit connections more explicit (McNamara,
Ozuru, & Floyd, 2011). Indeed, text parts that are highly
connected typically facilitate memory and are recalled more
often, even by struggling readers (Espin, Cevasco, van den
Broek, Baker, & Gersten, 2007). Finally, by directing attention to the important information using textual markers such
as headers (Lemarie, Lorch, Eyrolle, & Virbel, 2008) and
subheaders (Lorch, Lorch, & Mogan, 1987) and by organizing the content in a logical yet interesting way (Williams et al.,
2005), we can help readers create a coherent mental representation of the text with less effort. Thus, by carefully designing
texts in accordance to their instructional goal, we can ease
the cognitive load of the struggling reader and free-up important cognitive resources that, in turn, can be allocated to
the construction of a coherent representation of the text.
A third set of implications pertains to the nature of the
interventions designed to remediate struggling readers difficulties. A general implication is that, for an instructional
strategy or intervention to be effective, it needs to focus on
improving the online processes that occur during reading
(Rapp et al., 2007). For example, one can foster the generation of important and appropriate inferences by modeling
and practicing such inferences through questioning activities during reading. Indeed, the implementation of structured questioning interventions during reading shows great
promise for improving reading comprehension skills in various subgroups of struggling readers (McMaster et al., 2012).
Also, readers attention allocation during reading can be improved by implementing activities that direct attention to the
important or central information in texts (McKeown, Beck,
& Blake, 2009; Vaughn et al., 2000) and by practicing the detection and repair of coherence breaks (Mokhtari & Reichard,
2002).
A final set of implications pertains to the role of background knowledge. Having appropriate background knowl-

14

KENDEOU ET AL.: COGNITIVE MODEL OF READING

edge is essential for generating inferences (McNamara &

Kendeou, 2011). When the intervention goal is to help struggling readers develop inference making skills it is important that the materials do not require background knowledge that the student does not possess; without the required
knowledge the student simply would not be able to practice
inference making. When the intervention goal is to have the
reader acquire new content knowledge, then it is important
to introduce the new knowledge in a structured, well-paced
gradual manner to allow the reader to gradually construct
a coherent representation of the knowledge. An interesting
situation pertains to the correction of incorrect knowledge.
Incorrect knowledge or misconceptions lead to the generation of incorrect inferences and, consequently, to misunderstanding of new texts (Blanc, Kendeou, van den Broek, &
Brouillet, 2008; Kendeou, Muis, & Fulton, 2011; Kendeou
& van den Broek, 2007). From a processing point of view,
misconceptions are best confronted by presenting the existing, incorrect knowledge and the new, correct knowledge
explicitly and in close proximity in the text (Kendeou, Smith,
& OBrien, 2013; van den Broek, 2010; van den Broek &
Kendeou, 2008). By doing so, the two types of knowledge
are processed together and the chance that the misconception
is corrected is optimized.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Reading comprehension is complex, consisting of a combination of multiple subprocesses and functions. Theoretical
models in cognitive science describe these processes and
functions in considerable detail. These models suggest particular pressure pointslikely sources of comprehension
difficulties. In this article, we have provided an overview of
how these sources of difficulties affect reading comprehension processes and outcomes and may lead to reading comprehension problems. Consideration of the processes and of
potential sources of difficulty have practical implications for
the design and selection of instructional materials as well as
for the nature of interventions designed to remediate struggling readers difficulties. Understanding of these processes
not only provides teachers and reading specialists with an interdisciplinary view of the impact of these sources on reading
comprehension but, also, we hope, will inspire collaborative
work between theorists and practitioners in the study of these
topics.
NOTE
1. These models include the ConstructionIntegration
model (Kintsch & Van Dijk, 1978), the Landscape
Model (Tzeng, van den Broek, Kendeou, & Lee,
2005; van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm,
1999), the Structure Building Model (Gernsbacher,
1990), the Resonance Model (Albrecht & OBrien,
1993), the Event-Indexing Model (Zwaan, Langston,
& Graesser, 1995), the Causal Network Model (Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989), and the Constructionist Model (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso,
1994).

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About the Authors

Panayiota Kendeou, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the cognitive processes
that support learning and memory in the context of reading comprehension. She is Associate Editor of the Journal of Research
in Reading.
Paul van den Broek, Ph.D. (University of Chicago), is Director of the Brain and Education Laboratory at Leiden University,
The Netherlands, and holds faculty appointments in the Department of Education and Child Studies at Leiden University and
in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the cognitive and neurological
processes involved in reading comprehension in children and adults, and on the development of instructional methods for
proficient and struggling readers.
Anne Helder, M.Sc., is a Ph.D. student in the Brain and Education Laboratory at the Department of Education and Child
Studies at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She investigates developmental and individual differences in neurocognitive
processes involved in reading comprehension.
Josefine Karlsson, M.Sc., is a Ph.D. student in the Brain and Education Laboratory at the Department of Education and Child
Studies at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She investigates neurocognitive aspects of reading development aiming to gain
more insight on the effectiveness of reading interventions.