Learning to Read: The Role of Short-Term Memory and Phonological Skills

Abstract

This study investigates the relationships between reading, short-term memory and phonological skills, and the mechanisms responsible for the short-term memory differences found between groups of children differing in reading ability. Differences were found between groups of good, average, and poor readers in verbal, but not visual, short-term memory and these differences were well explained in terms of differences in speech rate (an index of rehearsal rate) between the groups. Measures of phonological ability, rhyme awareness and phoneme deletion, also showed strong differences between the different reading ability groups. Regression analyses showed that rhyme awareness, phoneme deletion, and speech rate (but not verbal short-term memory) had independent predictive relationships to reading skill. These findings show that phonological skills do not represent a unitary trait, and that different facets of phonological ability are important in predicting the development of reading skills.