A new tool for measuring and understanding individual differences in the component processes of reading comprehension

We propose a new measure of individual differences in reading comprehension ability that is theoretically motivated, is easy to administer, and that h as high predictive power. Participants read 3-sentence paragraphs that desc ribe the relations among a set of real and artificial terms, and then they respond to true-false statements that assess their ability to access and in tegrate long-term memory knowledge with text information, to make text-base d inferences, and to recall text. The components of our task predict perfor mance on a test of global reading comprehension and on a range of specific comprehension tests, each of which draws more heavily on one particular com ponent. Our task is better at predicting, reading comprehension than is a t ypical working memory span task and has the potential for a researchers' un derstanding and measurement of a range of linguistic and cognitive tasks.