Development of phonetic memory in disabled and normal readers

The development of phonetic codes in memory of 141 pairs of normal and disabled readers from 7.8 to 16.8 years of age was tested with a task adapted from L. S. Mark, D. Shankweiler, I. Y. Liberman, and C. A. Fowler (Memory & Cognition, 1977, 5, 623–629) that measured false-positive errors in recognition memory for foil words which rhymed with words in the memory list versus foil words that did not rhyme. Our younger subjects replicated Mark et al., showing a larger difference between rhyming and nonrhyming false-positive errors for the normal readers. The older disabled readers' phonetic effect was comparable to that of the younger normal readers, suggesting a developmental lag in their use of phonetic coding in memory. Surprisingly, the normal readers' phonetic effect declined with age in the recognition task, but they maintained a significant advantage across age in the auditory WISC-R digit span recall test, and a test of phonological nonword decoding. The normals' decline with age in rhyming confusion may be due to an increase in the precision of their phonetic codes.