PHONOLOGICAL WORKING-MEMORY AND READING IN TEST ANXIETY

Texts were presented sentence by sentence (Experiment 1) or word by wo rd (Experiment 2) at a fixed rate to subjects high or low in test anxi ety, under various conditions: no interference, concurrent articulator y suppression, and concurrent irrelevant speech (presented auditorily) . High-anxiety subjects produced overt articulation more frequently th an low-anxiety subjects, especially in the irrelevant speech condition . The most salient finding was an interaction between anxiety and inte rference on comprehension performance: under word-by-word-but not unde r sentence-by-sentence-presentation, anxious subjects showed poorer co mprehension than non-anxious subjects in both conditions known to inte rfere with the articulatory loop (i.e. articulatory suppression, and i rrelevant speech), but equivalent comprehension in the no interference condition. These findings suggest (a) that the articulatory loop has a special compensatory role for anxious individuals in reading compreh ension, and (b) that the importance of this auxiliary mechanism is enh anced when other strategies, such as regressive fixations and control of reading speed, cannot be used.