Children's memory for sentences and word strings in relation to reading ability

A previous study of letter-string recall by good & poor beginning readers (Shankweiler, D. et al, "The Speech Code and Learning to Read," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 1979, 5, 531-545) revealed that the performance of good readers was more severely penalized than that of poor readers when the letter names rhymed. To determine whether the differences in susceptibility to phonetic interference extend to materials that more closely resemble actual text, an experiment was designed to test recall of phonetically controlled sentences & word strings. It was found that although good readers made fewer errors than poor readers (N = 15 each) when sentences or word strings contained no rhyming words, they did not excel when the materials contained many rhyming words. In contrast to manipulations of phonetic content, systematic manipulations of meaningfulness & variations in syntactic structure did not differentially affect the two reading groups. It is concluded that the poor readers' inferior recall of phonetically nonconfusable sentences, word strings, & letter strings reflects failure to make full use of phonetic coding in working memory. 2 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 31 References. HA