THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DISCRIMINATION AND MEMORY ABILITY IN CHILDREN WITH READING DISABILITIES

In an earlier study, Hurford and Sanders (1990) found that young disabled readers were deficient in their ability to adequately discriminate the phonological information within syllables. Although the task was originally thought to tap discrimination ability exclusively, it may have required more memory processing than was intended. In Experiment 1 of the present study, 64 second-, third-, and fourth-grade children with and without reading disabilities were assessed to determine if phonological memory played a role in the discrimination task. The poor performance of the young disabled readers on the discrimination task disappeared when the amount of phonological information to be encoded was reduced. Only the second-grade disabled readers participated in Experiment 2, which indicated that memory demands were important to the discrimination task. The results of the present study indicate that young disabled readers may be unable to hold phonemic information in memory long enough to make adequate discriminations. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.