The role of vocabulary breadth and depth on reading comprehension in grade 1-4

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore the role of vocabulary breadth and depth in reading comprehension. Specifically, the study examined which vocabulary knowledge (including receptive vocabulary, word associations and definitions) would influence on reading comprehension. Methods: Forty-three children in grades 1-2 and 51 children in grades 3-4 participated in the study. All children obtained 70 or higher on the nonverbal intelligence test. All participants were administered two reading comprehension tasks, and three vocabulary tests including receptive vocabulary, word associations, and word definitions. Because different reading comprehension formats would have different components affecting the contribution of reading comprehension, an open-ended question format and cloze task format were used. Stepwise multiple regressions were conducted to determine which vocabulary knowledge explained the two reading comprehension scores. Results: In grades 1 and 2, word association and definition accounted for the unique variances in each reading comprehension task. In grades 3 and 4, definition explained the variance in each comprehension task. Receptive vocabulary accounted for additional variance only on cloze-format reading comprehension. Conclusion: The results of the study were consistent with previous studies which suggested vocabulary knowledge would be an important key for text comprehension. Specifically, depth of vocabulary is more important for reading comprehension than depth breadth of vocabulary.