Memory for item order and phonetic recording in the beginning reader.

A defect in immediate memory for item order is often attributed to poor beginning readers. We have supposed that this problem may be a manifestation of an underlying deficiency in the use of phonetic codes. Accordingly, we expected good and poor readers to differ in their ability to order stimuli that can be easily recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not in their ability to order nonlinguistic stimuli that do not lend themsel ves to phonetic recoding in short-term memory. The purpose of the present study was to test this hypothesis by examining the ability of good and poor readers to reconstruct the order of sets of briefly presented stimuli that varied in the extent to which they could be distinctively recoded into phonetic form: pictures of common objects versus nonrepresentational, "doodle" drawings. As expected, an interaction between reading ability and type of stim-ulusitem was found, demonstrating the material-specific nature of poor readers I ordering difficulties. These findings support the hypothesis that a function of the phonetic representation is to aid in retention of order information, and that poor readers I ordering difficulties are related to their deficient use of phonetic codes. Certain commonly occurring memory problems of poor beginning readers have been regarded as manifestations of an underlying deficiency in the use of phonetic codes. Several studies have shown that children who are poor readers tend to make ineffective use of phonetic coding in short-term recall of Fischer, 1979). However, special difficulties with recall and recognition arise only when the stimulus items are words or other items that can readily be labeled linguistically and retained phonetically in working memory (Holmes When the stimuli do not lend themselves to phonetic coding, the performances of good and poor readers cannot be distinguished. 1) tested recognition memory with two sets of stimuli that could not be easily labeled: BRS Grant RR~05596 to Haskins Laboratories. We are grateful to the principal and teachers of the Parker Memorial School, Tolland, Connecticut, for allolFling us to Hork Hith the second-grade classes. We are also grateful to the children Hho participated and their parents for their cooperation. Special thanks are due to Leonard Katz for statistical advice.