Word length, phonemic, and visual similarity effects in poor and normal readers

Abstract

A.M.M. is now at the University of York. The work was conducted while A.M.M. was a PhD student at the University of St. Andrews. We thank the Primary 3 pupils and staff at Glebelands Primary School in Dundee. 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. Correspondence should be addressed to R. S. Johnston, Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, England (e-mail: r.s.johnston@ hull.ac.uk). Serial order recall for visually and auditorily presented stimuli was examined in a group of 12-year-old poor readers and 7-year-old reading-age controls. With pictorial presentation, the poor readers showed a visual similarity effect, no word length effect, and a smaller phonemic similarity effect than that of controls. However, with visual presentation of printed words and with auditory presentation, poor readers showed word length and phonemic similarity effects of similar magnitude to that of controls. It is concluded that poor readers rely on visual information in tasks where the presented images are highly codable, and where verbal recoding is not obligatory, but that they will make use of phonological coding when the stimuli are not as easily codable visually in memory.

Phonological working memory in German children with poor reading and spelling abilities

“…The authors concluded that the poor readers rely on visual strategies in situations where phonological coding is not obligatory. This conclusion was confirmed in a more recent followup study (McNeil & Johnston, 2004). Here, the reading age controls showed clear effects of phonemic similarity and word length with pictorial presentation, whereas the poor readers showed no word length effect and a reduced phonemic similarity effect.…”

“…Because of important methodological differences, the reasons for these discrepancies are difficult to explain. For example, McNeil and Johnston (2004) used four-item lists and took number of sequences correctly recalled as performance measure, whereas Irausquin and de Gelder (1997) used six-item lists for roughly the same age group and proportion correct per serial position as dependent variable. Furthermore, Irausquin and de Gelder's (1997) participant groups were equated for digit span.…”

Poor readers’ use of orthographic information in learning to read new words: A visual bias or a phonological deficit?

“…The findings from the present study, taken together with those of others (Macaruso et al, 1996;McNeil & Johnston, 2004), may have direct implications for understanding the nature of poor readers' slowness in learning to recognize new words. In normal readers, repeated exposure to words or other printed stimuli that have verbal labels usually leads to the development of interconnections between the visual and the verbal modalities (Swanson, 1987).…”

“…Consequently, their word recognition may have been less well underpinned by connections in memory between the letters in the spelling and the phonemes in the pronunciation (Ehri, 1992). In another study, these same poor readers showed a visual bias in their memory codes for pictorial stimuli (McNeil & Johnston, 2004). In serial order recall tasks, when children (and adults) encode pictorial information verbally and rehearse the items, they show word length effects (i.e., better recall of short than of long words; Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975) and phonemic similarity effects (i.e., better recall of phonologically dissimilar than of similar items; Baddeley, 1986).…”

“…The poor readers' pattern of performance on the working memory tasks (McNeil & Johnston, 2004), where they showed a lack of phonological coding when presentation was pictorial, may therefore stem from fewer or degraded interconnections between the visual and the verbal representations as a result of these systems being poorly coordinated, thus producing a reliance on intact visual processes. Evidence that their visual skills were intact is shown by their scores on the WISC Performance IQ subtests (Block Design and Object Assembly).…”