The Porphyrian tree. Assessing word comprehension in reading

The assessment of reading comprehension is not a recent or an abstruse practice: it starts when a parent or a teacher observes a child reading or asks him questions on what he has just read. Though influenced by a variety of factors, comprehension is always based on the width of the readers’ lexical encyclopedia. From the point of view of assessment, this causes problems for the validity of measurement tools because the results obtained from exercises based on “generic” texts do not provide a complete testing of comprehension skills concerning any type of text. Such skills must be supported by appropriate encyclopedias allowing to disambiguate the meaning of the words according to the context. Starting from this logical framework, this project aimed at designing and constructing a model with all the appropriate procedures for the assessment of reading comprehension that might diagnose gaps in the lexical repertoire and focusing on the logical structures of words definitions in restricted semantic areas.