Auditory and visual retention in poor and normal readers when verbal encoding is disrupted

Abstract

Second and sixth grade poor and normal readers attempted to retain auditorily and visually presented target letters for 0, 4, or 10 seconds while they were shadowing letter names presented auditorily in rapid succession. Target letters sounded either similar or dissimilar to shadowing letters. Since shadowing presumably disrupted phonological encoding of the target stimuli, it was possible to evaluate reader groups' auditory and visual retention ability when they could not rely on such encoding. Consistent with the phonological coding interpretation of individual differences in reading ability, normal readers were less accurate than poor readers in auditory target letter recall when phonological encoding was disrupted. Normal readers were inferior to poor readers in visual target recall as well. As expected, differences between reader groups in phonological encoding were more strongly indicated in second than sixth grade, suggesting that older poor readers' sensitivity to phonological information is more like that of normal readers. Post hoc analyses suggested that normal readers, especially sixth graders, were disrupted more than poor readers by concurrent tasks used in the study.