READING DIFFICULTIES OF COLLEGE STUDENTS WITH ADHD: A STUDY OF THE INFLUENCE OF WORKING MEMORY ON READING COMPREHENSION

Abstract

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which has language disorders as some of its comorbidities. Reading comprehension difficulty in adults with this disorder has been the most common complaint within the academic scope. This paper aims to analyze how the reading process occurs in undergraduate students with ADHD, check whether impairments in reading comprehension are due to ADHD, investigate the influence of working memory on the reading comprehension of participants with ADHD, and compare the speed performance on the lexical decision task among participants with and without ADHD. Fifteen undergraduate students diagnosed with ADHD and 15 undergraduate students without this disorder participated in this study. The experiments used for data collection were: the Cloze, the Task for Linguistic Attention (TAL) and the Computerized Version of Reading Span Test for Brazilian Portuguese (VCRST-PB). The results indicated that the working memory capacity of participants with ADHD measured by the VCRST-PB was reduced a negative influenced the reading comprehension, as well as the TAL showed a greater influence than the VCRST-PB reading ability. This can be explained by the fact that the reading process requires a greater demand of sustaining attention for the emergence of the understanding of the content read. Therefore, this takes a great deal of effort for undergraduate students with ADHD due to the difficulties they present in the executive control.