Phonemic-similarity effects in good vs. poor readers

Experiments 1–4 examined immediate serial recall of rhyming and nonrhyming items by normal and poor readers in Grades 2–4. Children with generally low achievement were excluded from the poor-reader groups, so that the achievement deficit of the poor readers was centered in reading. The poor readers did not differ from the normal readers in their susceptibility to phonemic similarity either with letter lists or with word lists. Children low in both achievement and intelligence were included in Experiment 3, and they also showed normal susceptibility to phonemic similarity, except that phonemic-confusion effects were reduced when task-difficulty levels were high. Experiment 5 further demonstrated that the serial-recall task is relatively insensitive to phonemic-similarity effects when difficulty levels are high. Previous results suggesting that poor readers are relatively insensitive to phonemic similarity in such tasks may have been an artifactual consequence of marked differences in overall task difficulty for the groups compared. Implications of variations in sample-selection procedures also are discussed.