Children's Memory for Recurring Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Material in Relation to Reading Ability

Abstract

Good beginning readers typically surpass poor beginning readers in memory for linguistic material such as syllables, words, sentences. Here we present evidence that this interaction between reading ability and memory performance does not extend to memory for nonlinguistic material like faces and nonsense designs. Using an adaptation of the continuous recognition memory paradigm of Kimura (1963) we assessed the ability of good and poor readers in the second grade to remember three different types of material: photographs of unfamiliar faces, nonsense designs, printed nonsense syllables. For both faces and designs, the performance of the two reading groups was comparable; only when remembering the nonsense syllables did the good readers perform at a significantly superior level. These results support other evidence that distinctions between good and poor beginning readers do not turn on memory, per se, but rather on memory for linguistic material. Thus they extend our previous finding that poor readers encounter specific difficulty with the use of linguistic coding in short-term memory.