Individual differences in children's memory and reading comprehension: An investigation of semantic and inhibitory deficits

Abstract

Three experiments compared the verbal memory skills of children with poor reading comprehension with that of same-age good comprehenders. The aims were to determine if semantic and/or inhibitory deficits explained comprehenders’ problems on measures of verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory. In Experiment 1 there were no group differences on word- and number-based measures of short-term storage and no evidence that semantic knowledge mediated word recall. In Experiment 2 poor comprehenders were impaired on word- and number-based assessments of working memory, the greatest deficit found on the word-based task. Error analysis of both word-based tasks revealed that poor comprehenders were more likely to recall items that should have been inhibited than were good comprehenders. Experiment 3 extended this finding: Poor comprehenders were less able to inhibit information that was no longer relevant. Together, these findings suggest that individual differences in inhibitory processing influence the ability to regulate the contents of working memory, which may contribute to the differential memory performance of good and poor comprehenders.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported, in part, by a New Lecturer Grant from the University of Nottingham awarded to the author. I thank the schools in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire for their participation in this work, and Kate Lemmon who assisted with the data collection. I would also like to thank John Towse for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

¹These words had been matched for frequency of occurrence in children's reading materials by Nation et al. using Caroll, Davies, and Richman's (1971) norms and found to differ in their concreteness as rated by adults, in work conducted by Walker and Hulme (1999).