Abstract
In this study, we examined the ability of 11-year-old poor readers and reading age controls to learn new print vocabulary. It was found that the poor readers were slower than the controls to learn to read a set of nonwords accurately but that, when asked to pick out the nonwords in a visual recognition memory task, they reached criterion much more quickly than did the controls. However, when the groups were compared on auditory recall of the items being learned, the poor readers were at a disadvantage. Thus, the poor readers developed a visual store for the nonwords more quickly than did the controls but were slower to establish phonological representations for the nonwords. It was concluded that the poor readers were slower to establish a form of sight word reading that was well underpinned in memory by connections between the letters in the spelling and the phonemes in the pronunciation, suggesting that they had a greater reliance on an orthographic-semantic pathway in word recognition than did the controls.
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The work was conducted while A.M.M. was a PhD student at the University of St. Andrews.
A special mention is also due the pupils and their teachers at Clermiston and Craiglockhart reading units in Edinburgh for their support and assistance with this and other projects over the years.
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McNeil, A.M., Johnston, R.S. Poor readers’ use of orthographic information in learning to read new words: A visual bias or a phonological deficit?. Memory & Cognition 36, 629–640 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.3.629
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.3.629