The purpose of the experiment was to discover whether syntactic structure faci1itates reca11 in good readers, and whether, this effect exists in chi1dren who are poor readers.A paired-associate task equated the two groups on their abi1ity to associate simple, fami1iar words.Each child was taught with a tape recorder, four 1ists, composed of nonsense e1ements, and grammatical markers; two of which, were syn-tactica11y structured, the other two, unstructured.The good readers 1earned the structured 1ists more rapid1y than the unstructured 1ists.The poor readers 1earned both kinds of 1ists with equa1 difficu1ty.There was no difference between the good reader's and the poor reader's abi1ity to retain the unstructured materia1.Rence, the locus of the facilitation effect lies in the syntactic cues, imp1icit in the structured 1ist.
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Weinstein et al. (1971) studied this question.