The relationship between self-reported sleep quality and reading comprehension skills

Inadequate sleep undermines many cognitive functions, including memory, concentration, and attention, which are vital in everyday activities. We hypothesized that poor quality or shorter sleep length may impair reading-related skills, resources, and outcomes, specifically verbal working memory span, verbal efficiency, and reading comprehension. Contrary to the hypotheses, neither short sleep length nor self-reported sleep quality were related to reading skills performance. However, longer sleep times were significantly related to lower verbal efficiency, and participants with the poorest sleep quality fared significantly better on the reading comprehension task than participants with moderate sleep quality. Given the paucity of research examining sleep and reading specifically, as well as these surprising data, more research in this area is warranted.