Abstract
This study examined the role of phonetic factors in the performance of good and poor beginning readers on a verbal short-term memory task. Good and poor readers in the second and third grades repeated four-item lists of consonant-vowel syllables in which each consonant shared zero, one, or two features with other consonants in the string. As in previous studies, the poor readers performed less accurately than the good readers. However, the nature of their errors was the same: Both groups tended to transpose initial consonants as a function of their phonetic similarity and adjacency. These findings suggest that poor readers are able to employ a phonetic coding strategy in short-term memory, as do good readers, but less skillfully.
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The research and the preparation of the manuscript were supported in part by a grant to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-01994).
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Brady, S., Mann, V. & Schmidt, R. Errors in short-term memory for good and poor readers. Memory & Cognition 15, 444–453 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197734
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197734