Evidence for Top-Down Processing in Reading Comprehension of Children

The current research discusses the problem of the different reading processing models that prevail nowadays in Psychology. Here we find a duality between the bottom-up approach, which has been extensively studied, and the top-down approach, which has been scarcely investigated. We attempt to identify the moment in a child's development when top-down processing in reading comprehension starts working. The level of difficulty of the texts used to assess comprehension was experimentally manipulated by breaking up the structure of the words in order to prevent the use of bottom-up processing. The school year of the participating children was the second independent variable. The effects of both variables on reading comprehension were shown, besides the existence of top-down processing in children. The results suggest that top-down processing is present from very early ages, that it starts to develop around the second year of primary school and that its effectiveness is comparable to that of bottom-up processing in later school years.