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Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 12:1 (2017) ► pp.129–158

Poor performance on the retention of phonemes’ serial order in short-term memory reflects young children’s poor reading skills

| Thomas More University College | University of Leuven | University of Antwerp
| Thomas More University College
| University of Leuven
| Hasselt University
| University of Antwerp

The present study aimed to identify crucial factors that underlie phonological representations in short-term memory (STM) of third-graders with different literacy skills. For this purpose, we used the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT) to disentangle the processing of phonemes’ identity and their serial order. We found no evidence that children’s literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ identity. However, their literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ serial order. The latter link can be interpreted in terms of a domain-general STM mechanism but is also compatible with the impact of literacy on children’s knowledge of the phonotactic regularities in a language.

Keywords: phonological representation, nonword repetition task, phoneme identity, serial order, short-term memory
Article outline
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Materials and design
    • Procedure
      • Nonword level score
      • Phoneme level scores
    • Statistical analyses
  • Results
    • Correlational analyses
    • Analysis of nonword level performance
    • Analysis of phoneme level performance
      • Analysis of phoneme identity performance
      • Analysis of serial order performance
  • General discussion
    • Retention of phonemes’ identity vs. retention of serial order
    • Item retention vs. serial order retention in STM
    • A serial order mechanism in STM vs. phonotactic knowledge in LTM
    • Cause or effect?
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.12.1.06sch
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