Predictors of reading comprehension ability in primary school-aged children who have pragmatic language impairment.

Freed et al. (2015) looked at what best predicts reading comprehension in primary-school children with pragmatic language impairment.

They tested each child’s word-reading accuracy and their ability to understand spoken stories that were longer than a single sentence.

Then they ran a regression to see how much those two skills explained reading comprehension scores.

Reading accuracy plus spoken story-level understanding together explained three-quarters of the variance in reading comprehension.

In plain words: if you know how well a child reads words and how well they grasp spoken stories, you can fairly well predict how they will understand written text.

Cheng et al. (2024) recently reviewed dozens of studies on developmental language disorders and also flagged expressive language as a key predictor, matching Jenny’s story-level finding.

Carter et al. (2013) used the same regression method with high-functioning ASD kids and found semantics did NOT add predictive power—seemingly opposite to Jenny’s result. The difference is that W et al. tested single-word meaning, while Jenny tested whole-story comprehension, so both papers agree that higher-level language matters more than single words.

Holck et al. (2010) earlier showed that children with PLI struggle with inferential questions; Jenny’s work extends that by showing the struggle carries over into reading and can be caught early with a quick spoken-story probe.

If you assess a child with PLI, add a short spoken narrative task—ask them to retell or answer questions about a story you read aloud. That single score, paired with a word-reading check, gives you a reliable picture of likely reading comprehension without extra testing. Use the results to decide whether to target story-level oral language, word recognition, or both in your intervention plan.