The study described in this text was undertaken to test the hypothesis that reading comprehension items, which elicit specific bottom-up and top-down strategies, favour certain linguistic/cultural groups. Although a variety of statistical methods have been developed for flagging test items that function differentially for equal ability examinees from different ethnic, linguistic, or gender groups, the standard differential item functioning (DIF) detection procedures have not been very useful in explaining why DIF occurs. To address this problem, a confirmatory approach to DIF was used to...