Impact of the central executive on reading comprehension for the pupils enrolled in the grades from the second to the fourth of the primary cycle

Abstract EN

Learning to read in children is a complex operation which involves high-level cognitive functions, for decoding writing and then understanding it.

The reader searches for meaning at the level of morphological units as well as their global coherence, which involves active processing at the level of the central executive that is one of the components of the working memory.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of the central executive on reading comprehension in eighty-three pupils enrolled in the grades from 2 to 4 in primary school.

Simple linear regression analysis showed that there is a significant impact, and these results are supported by previous studies that have demonstrated the impact of the central executive on the comprehension of written and spoken language.

These results will help us better understand the involvement of the working memory in text comprehension, and anticipate difficulties of reading comprehension.