The Contribution of Cognitive Flexibility to Children’s Reading Comprehension – the case for Danish

Multiple cognitive skills support the acquisition of proficient reading skills. Higher order processing abilities allowing the engagement and integration of multiple ideas collectively referred to as executive functions may be particularly important in reading comprehension. In the present study, 39 Danish school age children completed executive function tasks tapping cognitive flexibility and working memory, as well as measures of reading comprehension, nonword reading, receptive language and nonverbal intelligence. Results revealed that unique variance in children's sentence reading comprehension was explained by their abilities in the cognitive flexibility tasks even after differences in age, decoding, naming speed, receptive language, working memory and nonverbal intelligence were taken into account. The results are discussed in relation to the generalisability of the relationship between cognitive flexibility and reading comprehension across different languages and future research investigating the potential of these findings for reading intervention.