Phonetic Short-Term Memory Representation in Children’s Reading of Greek

Abstract

The objective of this study was to test the role of phonetic STM representation in reading, in a replication study where young Greek children, who were either good or poor readers, were involved. Given that STM is one of the cognitive prerequisites of reading and that phonetic coding is well involved in STM storage during reading, the aim of the present investigation was to see whether the good readers could be distinguished from the poor readers on the basis of their reliance on phonetic coding when the Greek spelling system was employed. Three experiments were conducted involving the STM storage and recall of rhyming and nonrhyming letter and word strings, presented orally and/or visually to good and poor young readers of Greek. The results showed that, overall and irrespective of the way of stimuli presentation, the good readers were more affected by the phonetic confusability factor than the poor readers. Those results were interpreted on the basis of the inefficient phonetic representation hypothesis which implicates the way in which letter-sound correspondence rules are established.