Serial recall and nonword repetition in reading disabled children

This study examined the performance on verbal short-term memory tasks of sp ecifically reading disabled children relative to reading-age matched and ch ronological-age matched control groups. Memory span for words, highly wordl ike nonwords and less wordlike nonwords, speech rates for these items, and nonword repetition were examined. The reading disabled group performed equi valently to the reading-age controls on all tasks, and worse than the chron ological-age controls. An effect of the wordlikeness of the nonwords was fo und in all tasks. Differences in speech rate accounted for the effect of wo rdlikeness in memory span but not for the difference between words and nonw ords, or for the difference between groups. The stimulus effects did not va ry between the groups suggesting that reading disabled children are not imp aired on the process which gives rise to these effects, however they are im paired on the task overall, even after speech rate differences are taken in to account. These results are consistent with the notion that there is a lo ng-term memory contribution to memory span which is related to reading abil ity.