The Relationships Between Lower‐ and Higher‐Level Cognitive Skills and Multimodal Reading Comprehension Among Fourth‐Grade Students in the Digital Age

Multimodal reading skills are essential for 21st-century students to interpret and navigate information across various modalities on the Internet and in multimedia environments. While previous studies have delved into the effects of lower- and higher-level cognitive skills on traditional reading comprehension, which involves solely written texts, relatively, few have investigated their influence in the context of multimodal reading, where texts are combined with images, audio, video, and other modalities. This study aimed to explore the relationships among lower-level cognitive skills (i.e., word decoding, listening comprehension, and image comprehension), higher-level cognitive skills (i.e., prior knowledge and inference), and multimodal reading. A total of 251 fourth grade students from Hong Kong participated in this study. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to analyze the data. The results indicated that both lower- and higher-level skills positively influence multimodal reading. Moreover, the mediating role of inference between lower-level skills and multimodal reading and the moderating role of word decoding between inference and multimodal reading were identified. This study enriches the literature on the influence of various cognitive factors in the multimodal reading process and offers significant implications for enhancing multimodal reading skills and designing effective instructional strategies.