The reading span test and its predictive power for reading comprehension ability

This study had two major goals: to test the effect of administration method on the criterion validity of a commonly used working memory span test, the reading span task, and to examine the relationship between processing and storage in this task. With respect to the first goal, although experimenter- and participant-administered reading span tasks were equally reliable and induced similar types of strategies, the extra time taken to implement strategies in the participant-administered version reduced the correlations with reading comprehension and verbal SAT scores. With respect to the second goal, although sentence processing times were related to storage ability, they did not mediate the relationship between reading span scores and comprehension measures. Hence, theories focusing on processing as an explanation for what the reading span task really measures are incomplete. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.