SPb~ECH 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 deficit may have its origin in perception wi th 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 wi thout noise or in perception of nonspeech environmental sounds, whether noise-masked or not. Together, the resul ts of the perception studies suggest that poor readers have a perceptual difficulty that is specific to speech. It is suggested that the shortterm memory deficits characteristic of poor readers may stem from material-specific problems of perceptual processing. +Also University of Connecticut, Storrs, Ct. ++Also Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pa. Acknowledgment. The authors wish to thank several colleagues for their helpful comments and suggestions: Carol Fowler, Vicki Hanson, Leonard Katz, Robert Katz, and Alvin Liberman. We are especially grateful to Isabelle Liberman, whose insightful comments on earlier drafts contributed to the clari ty of this presentation. We are also indebted to William Holland, Superintendent of Schools, Narrangansett, Rhode Island, and to the faculty at the Narragansett Elementary School for their kind cooperation: David Hayes, Principal; Judy Aiello, Reading Coordinator; and the third grade teachers (Sue Boland, Leslie Flynn, Edward O'Brien, Hope Rawlings, and Marguerite Strain). This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Heqlth and Human Development (Grant HD-01994) to Haskins Laboratories. [HASKINS LABORATORIES: Status Report on Speech Research SR-69 (1982)J