ARTICULATORY LOOP AND CHILDRENS READING

Three experiments investigated whether the articulatory loop is used a s a temporary phonological store in 7- to 9-year-old children's readin g. Performance of various reading tasks was examined with and without articulatory suppression, an interference procedure which disrupts the articulatory loop. Experiment 1 used a lexical decision task involvin g presentations of words, pseudohomophones (e.g. HUNNIE), and non-homo phonic non-words. Pseudohomophones led to longer response times and mo re errors than non-homophonic non-words, but this effect was unaltered by articulatory suppression. Overall, suppression led to better perfo rmance, producing faster response times with no increase in errors. In Expt 2, suppression impaired performance on a rhyme-judgement task. I n Expt 3, children performed a lexical decision task in which letter s trings were presented in either a normal format or in two parts arrang ed one above the other so as to enforce prelexical blending. Suppressi on led to faster response times and had no effect on errors, regardles s of the need to combine the word segments. These results suggest that for beginning readers, as with fluent readers, the articulatory loop is used for rhyme judgements but a separate kind of phonological codin g is used in making lexical decisions.