Language processing and reading ability in children: A study based on speech-shadowing techniques

Language-processing facility in good and poor readers was examined using two speech-shadowing experiments. A total of 54 children from the second, fifth, and eighth grades were tested (9 good and 9 poor readers at each grade level). The first experiment manipulated rate of presentation to study speed of processing auditory-linguistic information. Good readers were superior to poor readers in their ability to maintain shadowing accuracy at increased rates of presentation, although the performance patterns of the two groups varied according to grade level. In the second experiment, good and poor readers shadowed sentences exhibiting different degrees of grammatical acceptability. Unstructured word strings, without syntactic coherence, penalized good readers more than poor readers, relative to their performance on syntactically appropriate constructions. Poor readers did not differ from good readers in theirThis work was supported by funds from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BNS-8405085. Portions of the research were presented at the Tenth Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, 1985, and the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 1986. This paper is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to Harvard University.