Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13: 31–56, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 31 Phonological skills and comprehension failure: A test of the phonological processing deficit hypothesis KATE CAIN 1 , JANE OAKHILL 1 & PETER BRYANT 2 1 Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, UK; 2 Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK Abstract. Shankweiler and colleagues argue that text comprehension problems in young chil- dren arise from phonological processing difficulties. Their work has focused on children with poor word reading ability. We investigated this hypothesis for children who experience com- prehension difficulties in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. We found that good and poor comprehenders performed comparably on various measures of phonological processing and differed on a task that made greater demands on working memory, Bradley and Bryant’s odd-word-out task. In a final study, hierarchical regression analyses supported this distinction: the odd-word-out task was a strong predictor of reading comprehension per- formance even after IQ, vocabulary and single word reading had been controlled for, but a less memory-dependent phonological task was not. These studies support previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders’ problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties. Keywords: Comprehension deficits, Phonological awareness, Phonological processing, Read- ing Comprehension, Young children Introduction The studies presented in this paper focus on a group of children with a specific comprehension deficit: children who are good readers but who fail to understand text effectively. This group represents approximately 10–15% of children aged between 7 and 8 years (Stothard & Hulme 1996; Yuill & Oakhill 1991). These children’s comprehension problems are evident in listening as well as reading tasks (Cain, Oakhill & Bryant, submitted; Stothard & Hulme 1992), and we propose that they stem primarily from deficits in higher-level cognitive abilities such as inference making, working memory and story structure knowledge (see, for a review, Yuill & Oakhill 1991). A different explanation of comprehension problems has been pro- posed by Shankweiler and colleagues (see, for a review, Shankweiler 1989). According to their account, comprehension difficulties arise when children are unable to set up or sustain a phonological representation of the incoming verbal information. As a result, they experience difficulties in retaining and