| Abstract | Explored whether poor readers' memory deficit has its origin in perception with the encoding of the stimuli. Three experiments were conducted with 30 3rd-grade good and poor readers (determined by the Word Attack and Word Recognition subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, Form A). Poor readers were found to perform less well on recall of random word strings and to be less affected by the phonetic characteristics (rhyming or not rhyming) of the items (Experiment I). In addition, poor readers produced more errors of transposition (in the nonrhyming strings) than did
the good readers, a further indication of the poor readers' problems with memory for order. Subjects were tested on 2 auditory perception tasks, one employing words (Experiment II) and the other nonspeech environmental sounds (Experiment III). Each was presented under 2 conditions: with a favorable signal-to-noise ratio and with masking. Poor readers made significantly more errors than good readers when listening to speech in noise, but did not differ in perception of speech without noise or in perception of nonspeech environmental sounds, whether noise-masked or not. Together, results suggest that poor readers have a perceptual difficulty that is specific to speech. It is suggested that the short-term memory deficits characteristic of poor readers may stem from material-specific problems of perceptual processing. |
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