Can the Simple View of Reading Inform the Study of Reading Comprehension in Young Spanish Heritage Language Learners?

ABSTRACT This study examines the development of reading comprehension (RC) in Spanish heritage language (HL) learners in the Midwest United States. While extensive research exists on RC in monolingual English‐speaking populations, applying reading science models such as the Simple View of Reading (SVR) in HL or bilingual contexts remains under‐researched. Additionally, orthographies labeled as phonologically transparent—where grapheme‐to‐phoneme correspondences are relatively more consistent—such as Spanish, have not been thoroughly investigated within these frameworks. This study applies the SVR framework to a unique population of 74 Spanish‐English bilingual children, centering the Spanish HL rather than the majority language at two reading stages: early readers and pre‐readers. Using Structural Equation Modeling, we assess (1) concurrent roles of decoding and linguistic comprehension as SVR's cognitive bases for RC development in early readers and (2) exploratory relationships between decoding and linguistic comprehension predictors in pre‐readers. Results for Spanish HL readers indicate that linguistic comprehension, but not decoding, predicts significant unique variance in Spanish RC; however, the two components share significant variance and, combined, explain most of the variance in RC. Results for Spanish HL pre‐readers show a high correlation between linguistic comprehension and decoding predictors, indicating the interwoven nature of the two SVR components at earlier reading stages. The findings advance the discussion on the relevance of the SVR in phonologically transparent orthographies and across different stages of reading development, bridging minority and majority language research and informing educational strategies for Spanish HL learners.