Serial recall and nonword repetition in reading disabled children

This study examined the performance on verbal short-term memory tasks of specifically reading disabled children relative to reading-age matched and chronological-age matched control groups. Memory span for words, highly wordlike nonwords and less wordlike nonwords, speech rates for these items, and nonword repetition were examined. The reading disabled group performed equivalently to the reading-age controls on all tasks, and worse than the chronological-age controls. An effect of the wordlikeness of the nonwords was found in all tasks. Differences in speech rate accounted for the effect of wordlikeness in memory span but not for the difference between words and nonwords, or for the difference between groups. The stimulus effects did not vary between the groups suggesting that reading disabled children are not impaired on the process which gives rise to these effects, however they are impaired on the task overall, even after speech rate differences are taken into account. These results are consistent with the notion that there is a long-term memory contribution to memory span which is related to reading ability.