Semantic and phonetic memory codes in beginning readers

In two experiments a group (N=15) of poor beginning readers and of good readers (N=15) were auditorily presented with continuous item lists. The children were asked to indicate whether each item had occurred previously in the list. In Experiment 1, using real words, later items were related either semantically or as rhymes to earlier ones. False positives to each item type were taken as indices of memory coding and showed that good readers encoded both semantic and surface aspects of items. In contrast, poor readers made a large number of meaning-based confusions (saying “old” tohouse whenhome had been presented earlier) but almost none based on rhyme (home/comb confusions). In a second experiment, with phonetically legal nonwords as items, poor readers made a significant number of phonetic false positives, although the good reader controls made more. The results are interpreted as confirming that poor readers are relatively insensitive to surface features of language but that this weakness is most marked when sound and meaning are both available as memory codes.