Speech perception and memory coding in relation to reading ability

Previous work has demonstrated that children who are poor readers have short-term memory deficits in tasks in which the stimuli lend themselves to phonetic coding. The aim of the present study was to explore whether the poor readers' memory dificit may have its origin in perception with the encoding of the stimuli. Three experiments were conducted with third grade good and poor readers. As in earlier experiments, the 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 1). In addition, the 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. The subjects were tested on two auditory perception tasks, one employing words (Experiment 2) and the other nonspeech environmental sounds (Experiment 3). Each was presented under two conditions: with a favorable signal-to-noise ratio and with masking. The poor readers made significantly more errors than the 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, the results of the perception studies 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.     

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

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.     

Readers' Eye Movements Distinguish Anomalies of Form and Content

Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with the syntactic processing of sentences from costs associated with relating sentence meaning to real world probabilities. Participants (N = 30) read matching sets of sentences that differed by a single word, making the sentence syntactically anomalous (but understandable), pragmatically anomalous, or non-anomalous. Syntactic and pragmatic anomaly each caused perturbations in eye movements. Subsequent to the anomaly, the patterns diverged. Syntactic anomaly generated many regressions initially, with rapid return to baseline. Pragmatic anomaly resulted in lengthened reading times, followed by a gradual increase in regressions that reached a maximum at the end of the sentence. Evidence of rapid sensitivity to pragmatic information supports the use of timing data in resolving the debate over the autonomy of linguistic processing. The divergent patterns of eye movements support indications from neurocognitive studies of a principled distinction between syntactic and pragmatic processing procedures within the language processing mechanism.     

Grammatism

Findings from the literature on language development, dyslexia, and adult sentence processing provide a vehicle for comparing two models of the symptom complex associated with agrammatism. One model contends that agrammatism represents a deficit in linguistic structures. The other model maintains that the linguistic behavior associated with agrammatism is the result of a limitation in language processing. To adjudicate between the models, the present paper examines one linguistic construction, the restrictive relative clause. The results of experimental investigations across several subject populations reveal parallel patterns of linguistic behavior on this construction. The findings favor the processing limitation account of the linguistic difficulties experienced by agrammatic aphasics in comprehending sentences with a restrictive relative clause.