Verbal Rehearsal and Short-Term Memory in Reading-Disabled Children

The present study investigated the hypothesis that frequently found short-term memory deficits in poor readers may reflect a lack of ability or inclination to use efficient task strategies on some memory tasks. The performance of second-grade good and poor readers was compared on a task which allowed direct observation of the use of verbal rehearsal as a mnemonic strategy. Children in the 2 reading groups differed significantly in both total recall score and amount of verbalization (rehearsal) observed, with the poor readers obtaining lower scores on both measures. On a variation of the task which had been previously demonstrated to facilitate the use of rehearsal, the poor readers improved significantly in both amount of verbalization and total recall scores. On this latter task, the memory and verbalization scores of good and poor readers were not significantly different from one another.