Auditory short-term memory and digit span: Normal versus poor readers.

Abstract

These experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between reading comprehension level, digit span, and short-term memory for Morse code-like temporal patterns. Consistent with previous research on children, Experiment 1 demonstrated that college students performed better when the first pattern was auditory than when it was visual or tactual. Experiments 2 and 3 found no relationship for either college or fifth-grade students between digit span and accuracy in comparing patterns of tones presented a few seconds apart. However, both tasks discriminated between children with normal and poor reading comprehension scores on a standardized test. It appears that these two tasks index fundamental processes that underlie reading comprehension. Digit span seems to assess an individual's ability to rapidly develop meaningful codes in memory for incoming verbal stimuli. The auditory pattern comparison procedure appears to measure ability to maintain information in short-term memory.Differences in short-term memory capabilities have been shown to distinguish reading-disabled children from normal readers of the same age (e.g., Elkins & Suitman, 1981). However, Torgesen and Houck (1980) have pointed out that the specific deficiencies in learning-disabled children are not well understood. Birch and Belmont (1964) asserted that the difficulties of retarded readers derive from their inability to form connections between visually and auditorially coded information in short-term memory. Clearly, reading instruction concentrates on the translation of visually presented materials into sounds and vice versa. However, Rubinstein and Gruenberg (1971) pointed out that the experimental task employed by Belmont (1964, 1965

Unusual modality effects in less-skilled readers.

“…The auditory perceptual problem may extend to nonverbal stimuli in tasks such as indicating the sequence of two stimuli or judging whether two stimuli were presented or only one (Farmer & Klein, 1995; McCroskey & Kidder, 1980; Tallal, 1980). The auditory processing deficit may be reflected in tasks such as the Incomplete Words and Sound Patterns tests used here, or inter- and intramodal matching tasks (Badian, 1977; Hatchette & Evans, 1983; Payne & Holzman, 1983; Zendel & Pihl, 1983). There is some evidence for a deficiency in echoic memory (Hurford & Shedelbower, 1993).…”

Digit Span Changes From Puberty to Old Age Under Different Levels of Education

“…Other studies on children with learning disability, on normal and poor readers, and on adult clinical samples were focused on the processing of only the auditory and visual input modalities. The findings of these studies pointed to the existence of two separate stores for auditory and visual tasks (Curley & Reilly, 1983;Dean & Rothlisberg, 1983;Frick, 1984;Moore, 1986;Payne et al, 1980;Payne & Holzman, 1983;Rothlisberg & Dean, 1985). Although there are data from tests across modalities on clinical samples, there is little information on the effect of modality on digit span in "normal" samples.…”

“…Studies demonstrate the existence of individual preferences and differential difficulty in retaining visual or auditory material and in producing material in spoken or written form (Curley & Reilly, 1983;Dean & Rothlisberg, 1983;Koppitz, 1973;Moore, 1986;Rothlisberg & Dean, 1985). A group of findings demonstrated that normal readers were differentiated from the poor readers when the material was presented in the auditory modality (Payne, Davenport, Domangue, & Soroka, 1980;Payne & Holzman, 1983). Another group of findings showed that task structure, namely, the simultaneous versus sequential presentation of the digits in the VADS Test, could be a basis for differentiating good readers from poor ones (Torgesen, Bowen, & Ivey, 1978).…”

Questioning short-term memory and its measurement: Why digit span measures long-term associative learning

“…Furthermore, one of the most fundamental markers of human intelligence -language learning -depends critically on the ability to learn sequential information and individual differences in both language comprehension and verbal short-term memory are predicted by individual differences in learning sequential transitional probabilities (Misyak & Christiansen, 2012). Unsurprisingly, from this perspective, studies have shown that digit span performance strongly relates to language learning (Gathercole, Hitch, Service, & Martin, 1997;Payne & Holzman, 1983).…”