An Investigation of word encoding strategy and verbal short-term memory in dyslexic children

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to investigate the effect of verbal short term memory and encoding strategies in dyslexics. The first main aim was to investigate whether or not dyslexics made more errors with pairs that were phonologically similar but orthographically distinct compared with paris that were phonologically different but orthographically similar. Secondly we aimed to explore whether reaction times would be faster in for orthographically similar pairs compared with phonologically similar pairs, especially in the visual condition. The task consisted of two phases: the presentation phase and the recall phase. Two of the tasks were presented visually and two were presented auditorially with each tasks consisting of a list of 8 words. In the recall phase, each word (e.g. bear) from the list was paired with a distracter word. Four were paired with a phonologically similar but orthographically distinct word, (i.e. bear would be primed with scare) whilst the remaining four are paired with orthographically similar words but phonologically dissimilar (i.e. bear is paired with fear). The results showed that there was a significant effect of word type when reaction times were analysed by a repeated measures, mixed ANOVA. However this effect of word type was in conflict with our hypotheses, showing that dyslexics have faster reaction times for phonological similar word pairs. The results did not show significant effects of participant type or presentation type. Similarly there were no significant two or three way interactions in both the error rate and reaction time analysis. It was concluded that such results, were perhaps the caused by the poor sample size.