Errors in short-term memory for good and poor readers

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.Children who have difficulty learning to read have consistently been found to perform less well than good readers on a wide variety of short-term memory (STM) tasks

Longitudinal effects of verbal ability, memory capacity, and phonological awareness on reading performance

“…The results found here, taken together with those of Mann et al (1980), Brady et al (1983Brady et al ( , 1987, and Hitch et al (1988Hitch et al ( , 1989) suggest a developmental trend. Memory capacity affects the processing efficiency of phonological cues in preschool and in early elementary school.…”

“…Most of our children had only one and a half years of experience with the alphabet and reading at the time of second grade testing, as compared with (probably) almost three years of such experience for children in the Schankweiler et al study. Children in the Brady et al (1983Brady et al ( , 1987, and Mann et al (1980) studies were in the third grade, and therefore a considerable amount of reciprocal development in factors affecting reading could have occured prior to their study, as weil. It is debatable, thus a ripe issue for further study, how much reading experience is required before grapheme-phoneme relationships in encoding and decoding text becomes automatized, and thus demonstrates interference effects as found by Brady et al (1983Brady et al ( , 1987, Mann et al (1980), and Shankweiler et al (1979).…”

Depth of phonological recoding in short-term memory

“…This has been evident from the results of various studies showing the phonological nature of short-term memory (STM). It has been found that the errors subjects make in immediate recall are mostly phonological confusions; that is, items that share the same phonological features with the stimulus items were used in erroneous responses instead of items that share visual or semantic properties with the stimulus items (Brady, Mann, & Schmidt, 1987;Conrad, 1964;Wickelgren, 1965aWickelgren, , 1965b. It has also been found that subjects make more errors recalling series containing phonologically similar items than they do recalling phonologically dissimilar series.…”

Phonological similarity neighborhoods and children’s short-term memory: Typical development and dyslexia

“…The underspecification of phonological aspects of lexical representations characteristic of developmental dyslexia should impair redintegration processes and, hence, lead to impairments in phonological short-term memory. Many studies have indeed shown that phonological short-term memory is less efficient in dyslexic children (e.g., Brady, Mann, & Schmidt, 1987;McDougall, Hulme, Ellis, & Monk, 1994;Roodenrys & Stokes, 2001). Nevertheless, the phonological system may be acting to reconstruct decaying traces in the same way for dyslexic children as for typically developing children (by using redintegration) but may simply do so less efficiently in dyslexia (because of the poorer quality of long-term representations).…”