Psycholinguistic Processing in Reading and Listening among Good and Poor Readers

Abstract

Differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language, and psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous and random word strings to 18 good and 18 poor readers. In both spoken and written conditions the order of recall was meaningful > anomalous > random (p < .001), suggesting that syntactic and semantic demands of spoken and written sentences were similar. Poor readers were inferior to good readers on written presentations (p > .05). The groups were similar on spoken presentations. The reading comprehension deficiency could not be attributed to inadequate psycholinguistic processing, memory or automaticity in decoding. Incomplete decoding during silent reading by poor readers was supported as an explanation.