The relationship between domain-general cognitive skills and readingcomprehension in children

The relationship between domain-general cognitive skills and reading comprehension in children

Fatbardha Qehaja Osmani

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Sheffield

Faculty of Science

Department of Psychology

November 2020

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Daniel Carroll, for the
continuous support of my PhD study, for his patience, persistence and immense knowledge.
Thank you for believing in me in the most difficult times of my PhD journey when I almost
ceased believing in myself. I hope that I could be as positive and enthusiastic as you are, and
to someday be able to mentor students as well as you can. I would also like to thank,
Elisabeth Chrysochoou, my supervisor from SEERC in Thessaloniki, for her support in the
first couple of years of my PhD research. I sincerely thank Dr. Andrew Simpson and Dr.
Emma Blakey, my viva examiners, for their very helpful comments and suggestions. My
special thanks go to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Kosovo and to the
University of Sheffield, for selecting me as a grantee of the scholarship for my PhD studies.
This scholarship has been a great relief to me during my studies and I hope that with the
knowledge gained I will be able to contribute to the science in general and to my community
in particular.
There are a number of people who have contributed to this thesis, whose support I’d like to
acknowledge here. I’d like to thank Ermal Gashi, my field research assistant, for his
commitment and generous support during data collection. I appreciate all the support from
the Educational Directorate of the Municipality of Prishtina, and from the principals of the
following schools: “Afrim Gashi”, “The British School of Kosova”, ‘Shkolla Model”,
“Pjetër Bogdani”, “ Pavarsia”, and “Meto Bajraktari”. A very special thank goes to all the
children and their parents for willing to participate in my research studies. I should also
acknowledge the support of all translators and language experts who helped me in the process
of translation and adaptations of the experimental tasks.
My experience, as a Fulbright scholar at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, has been a
golden opportunity for me, providing me with additional knowledge and experience in
experimental design and assessment. Therefore, I would like to thank Dr. Nicole Landi, for
inviting me to this journey, sharing her thoughts on reading comprehension but also making it
possible for me to present my work at the Language Fest, University of Connecticut.
I owe hugely to my dear parents, Ramadan and Nazmije Qehaja, who set me off on the road
to this PhD a long time ago. Thank you for showing me that great things can be achieved
only by hard work. I am sure that my utmost commitment and strong resilience are virtues
inherited from both of you.
There is also a special person I’d like to thank for his support in my thesis, my brother
Florian Qehaja. Thank you for spending hours and hours listening to me and trying to figure
out ways to help me succeed in this thesis. Thank you for making my PhD less painful by
sharing your PhD experience with me and for continuously feeding my confidence!
Finally, and most importantly, I dedicate this thesis to my husband, Arben and to my three
sons, Don, Lir and Nart. Thank you for all your love and support, without which I would
have stopped these studies a long time ago. This rather long and complex PhD project has
been difficult not only for me but for all five of us, and you have always been there to love
me and cheer me up. I am absolutely blessed to have all four of you in my life!

Abstract
The aim of this research was to better understand how reading comprehension happens in
children. In particular, the main objective was to examine, in detail, the relationship between
higher-level comprehension skills and domain-general cognitive skills at a crucial period of
development – the time when children are becoming independent readers (8 to 10 years of age).
The novelty of this research was that different from previous studies it i) looked at all five
higher-level comprehension skills separately and in their relationship to domain-general
cognitive skills; ii) examined domain-general cognitive skills simultaneously rather than in
isolation; iii) considered the moderating role of the lower-level comprehension skills in this
relationship; and iv) provided valuable insight on how reading comprehension is achieved in a
language with transparent orthography. The findings demonstrated that higher-level
comprehension skills are underpinned by working memory and executive functions in both age
groups of children, but their contribution to higher-level comprehension skills increased around
the age of 10. Furthermore, the results of this thesis showed that working memory and
executive functions significantly interacted with reading fluency in predicting higher-level
comprehension skills in both age groups, albeit in the younger group this interaction was
present only in necessary inference while in older group this interaction was present only in
literal comprehension and comprehension control.