Abstract
A previous study of recall of letter strings by good and poor beginning readers IShankweiler, Liberman, Mark, Fowler, & Fischer, 1979 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, we designed an experiment to test recall of phonetically controlled sentences and word strings. As in the case of letter recall, we found that, although good readers made fewer errors than poor readers 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 and variations in syntactic structure did not differentially affect the two reading groups. We conclude that the poor readers’ inferior recall of phonetically nonconfusable sentences, word strings, and letter strings reflects failure to make full use of phonetic coding in working memory.
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Pike, R.Memory for words and reading ability. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, 1977.
Pike, R.Linguistic development as a limiting factor in learning to read. Paper presented at the First Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, 1976.
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Mann, V.A., Liberman, I.Y. & Shankweiler, D. Children’s memory for sentences and word strings in relation to reading ability. Memory & Cognition 8, 329–335 (1980). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198272
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198272