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The Dresser in Your Child’s Brain: Why Strong Comprehension Depends on Strong Language

By Danielle Malkmus, MS, CCC-SLP

When I talk with parents about reading comprehension, I often use an analogy: your child’s brain is like a dresser full of drawers.

The bottom drawer is the easiest to open. It holds the broadest, most general categories—things like living and not living.

Move up a drawer, and the categories become more specific: food, animals, clothing, vehicles.

Move up again, and the drawers get smaller and more specific: fruit → citrus → orange → navel orange.

The higher the drawer, the more specific the information becomes—and sometimes, those drawers are harder to reach. Your child may know the information is there, but accessing it quickly can take more effort.

That matters because strong language skills aren't just about knowing lots of words. Children need to be able to organize information, find the right words, connect ideas, and move flexibly between broad and specific categories.

And that's a big part of comprehension.

When a child reads a story about a robin, for example, they need to connect robin to bird, animal, and living thing. They may need to understand that a robin is a type of bird, recognize its characteristics, and use that knowledge to make sense of something the author doesn't explicitly say.

When those connections are easy to access, comprehension becomes easier.

When the drawers are difficult to open—or the information is sitting in a drawer that's hard to reach—reading can become much more effortful.

Good intervention is like a step stool.

The goal isn't to give a child the answer or simply teach them more vocabulary. It's to help them build a stronger system for organizing and accessing what they already know, while adding new language and concepts along the way.

With practice, the step stool becomes less necessary. The drawers become easier to reach, information becomes easier to access, and children can use their language more efficiently to understand what they read.

That's why reading comprehension isn't always a matter of reading more.

Sometimes, the work needs to happen in the language system underneath the reading.

At Point Speech Pathology & Literacy Lab, we work on those underlying language skills so children can not only read the words, but understand, connect, explain, and use what they're reading.