Executive Functioning and Reading

Reading involves the skill of decoding written words into meaning. The first step, decoding, is the process of teaching children how to connect symbols with sounds. In layman’s terms, this is “learning to read.”

Comprehension of words and sounds is the next step, and it involves several cognitive and linguistic processes working in harmony. These processes work together to help “read to learn.” One of those cognitive processes is called executive functioning.

What are Executive Functions?

Executive functions have been described in numerous ways, and researchers have yet to agree on a formal definition. Early conceptions of executive functions describe them as a central executive system overseeing other skills (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Juardo & Rosselli, 2007). Most psychologists agree that executive functions involve planning, reasoning, organizing, self-regulation, attention skills, and working memory (Juardo & Rosselli, 2007).

How do Executive Functions Impact Us?

Executive functions use multiple areas of the brain connected through pathways that develop prenatally through adulthood (Center on the Developing Child, 2012). The areas involved in executive functioning range from the frontal lobes to subcortical structures (Kolb & Whishaw, 2021). The development of executive functioning mirrors the myelination of the frontal lobes of the brain.

For example, children learn to regulate their attention and plan their actions in the preschool years (Baron, 2018). Young children can plan out how to solve simple problems (such as how to obtain a toy out of reach). Executive function development in preschool can predict later mathematic and reading abilities in children (Blair & Razza, 2007).

Executive functioning also impacts social and behavioral development in young children. Executive functioning is an area of early intervention that can impact a child long-term in academic, social, and behavioral domains (Center on the Developing Child, 2012).

How are Executive Functions Related to Reading Comprehension?

Executive functioning and reading comprehension can be conceptualized into three components (Chang, 2020):

• Cognitive flexibility, or our ability to shift between understanding the words we are reading and making connections between the words, other texts, and our lived experiences.
• Working memory, or our ability to hold a small amount of information for ongoing tasks.
• Inhibitory control, or our ability to regulate our attention and behavior to relevant tasks and suppress previously learned responses; in reading, this is the skill we use to suppress incongruent word meanings and/or irrelevant connections to the text.

These three executive functioning skills work together to support reading comprehension. There is emerging evidence that executive functioning skill development is an important prerequisite for reading comprehension (Spencer et al., 2020). Reading comprehension is predictive of a child’s overall academic functioning (Hernandez, 2011).

People who are struggling to read individual words often have a disorder called dyslexia. Dyslexic readers use a lot of mental effort to read words that eventually become automatic for typical readers. In a typical reader, a region in the occipital-temporal lobe is active during reading. This area is called the word-form area.

For many dyslexic readers, this region is not active during word reading. Instead, the frontal lobes are more active, resulting in great effort and incorporation of executive functioning areas for word reading rather than for comprehension of what is being read (“Brain Scans Reveal Disruption in the Neural Circuitry of Children with Dyslexia,” 2003). For example, children that are focused on decoding during their reading do not have the cognitive flexibility to think about the semantic meaning of the words or the text as a whole (Chang, 2020).

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How Can We Use Executive Functions to Improve Reading Comprehension?

For a person to read to learn, they must first master individual word reading. Once word reading is achieved, reading comprehension interventions can be implemented to improve understanding of written text.

Executive functioning interventions are one method of treating reading comprehension deficits. Targeting working memory can help struggling readers keep phonics rules in their memory while reading as well as help with blending sounds in unfamiliar words (Perrachione et al., 2017). Graphophonological-semantic cognitive flexibility interventions have been shown to improve reading comprehension (Cartwright et al., 2020). For executive function interventions to be effective in reading comprehension, they must include both direct reading skills and the targeted executive function component.