Although decoding did not emerge as a significant unique predictor of reading comprehension, we do not take this to mean that decoding is not an important contributor to adults' reading comprehension.
Working memory capacity is said to be a good predictor of reading comprehension, problem solving and other aspects of academic achievement.
Like previous researchers, she also found kindergarten vocabulary -- which reflects how much parents talk and read to their kids -- was an accurate predictor of reading comprehension in high school.
Results indicated that morphological awareness was a significant unique predictor of reading comprehension.
For the two younger groups, morphological awareness emerged as the only unique predictor of reading comprehension.
Both morphological and phonological awareness were significant unique predictors, but decoding was not a unique predictor of reading comprehension (see Table 2).
Previous research with children has found that morphological awareness is an important predictor of reading comprehension after controlling for phonological awareness (Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Kirby et al., 2012).
Although there have been no studies with ABE students looking at morphological awareness as a predictor of reading comprehension, we hypothesized that similar to studies of children, morphological, phonological, and decoding skills as a set would predict adults' reading comprehension.
Evidence may be drawn from some recent studies, in which oral vocabulary remained a significant predictor of reading comprehension, after controlling for word reading skills (Ouellette, 2006; Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop 2007), or when the effects of initial word reading, phoneme awareness, and letter knowledge were partialled from the analysis (Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson 2004).
For both types of storybooks, child attention, child language, and parent engagement were significant predictors of story comprehension.
