Cognitive Factors That Affect Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension refers to the ability of a reader to construct meaning from text. Expected levels of reading comprehension vary throughout a reader's lifespan. When children first learn to read, the emphasis is on understanding the meaning of words and how they form sentences to communicate simple ideas. As children grow into adults, reading comprehension grows to include semantic and symbolic understanding of written text.

Decoding and Word Recognition Speed

One cognitive factor that can affect reading comprehension is the speed at which the reader decodes and recognizes words. Decoding refers to the reader's ability to make sense of letter-sound relationships, including proper word pronunciation and noticing common letter combinations, in order to quickly recognize familiar words. Readers who experience difficulty with decoding and recognizing words read at a much slower pace and find it more difficult to comprehend the meaning of reading passages than their peers without decoding difficulties.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary breadth can also have an impact on reading comprehension. Readers use decoding skills to figure out the pronunciation and approximate meaning of words they haven't seen before, but this process takes far more time than recognition of a familiar word. Individuals with a wider vocabulary can interpret the meaning of reading passages faster and more thoroughly than individuals who must guess at the meanings of unfamiliar words based on context clues.

Attention and Motivation

The reader's attention and motivation are integral to reading comprehension. A reader whose attention is only partly on the reading passage may read the same paragraph several times without understanding what she is reading. Readers who lack motivation to comprehend the text may do the bare minimum of reading and understanding necessary for their assignment or class discussion without fully absorbing or interpreting the meaning of what they've read.

Quality of Reading Material

The quality of writing can also affect reading comprehension. Text that is poorly organized and difficult to understand can slow reading speed and significantly hinder reading comprehension. Poor-quality writing may slow decoding speed, as well as syntactic recognition and sentence comprehension. Poor-quality reading material can also cause readers to lose motivation while reading, which negatively affects the reader's comprehension of the text.