Increases in Intrusion Errors and Working Memory Deficit of Poor Comprehenders

Tested the hypothesis that the ability to inhibit already processed and actually irrelevant information could influence performance in the listening span test (M. Daneman and P. A. Carpenter, 1980) and have a crucial role in reading comprehension. In 2 experiments, the listening span test and a new working memory test were given to 2 groups of young adults, poor and good comprehenders. In Exp 1, the 22 poor comprehenders had a significantly lower performance in the listening span test associated with a higher number of intrusions. In Exp 2, a new working memory test was devised in order to analyze more effectively the occurrence of intrusions in 15 skilled and 15 unskilled comprehenders. Ss were required to listen to a growing series of strings of animal and non-animal words. They had to detect when an animal word occurred, and at the end of each series, they had to recall the last word of each string. The poor comprehenders performed significantly lower in the memory task and made a higher number of intrusions. Finally, the similar performance of 14 good and 16 poor comprehenders in Exp 3 shows that the poor performance by poor comprehenders in the other 2 experiments is not simply due to poorer memory ability with a dual task requirement.