Effects on Poor Readers' Comprehension of Training in Rapid Decoding

Two experiments were designed to examine the effects on comprehension of increasing the decoding speed of poor readers.In the first experiment, poor readers were trained to read a list of words as rapidly as good readers, and then asked to read a passage comprised of the practiced words.Decoding speed measures on the word list and passage and comprehension measures were obtained.The performance of the trained poor readers was compared to their performance on an equivalent untrained passage and to the performance of good readers.The second experiment was essentially a replication of the first, with the addition of a training condition which emphasized rapid phrase reading.The results of both experiments indicated that while decoding training, whether focusing on isolated words or on phrases, significantly increased the decoding speed of single words, it did not improve comprehension performance.The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to a decoding sufficiency hypothesis.