Reading
Do poor readers retrieve words from memory in the same way?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People with weak vocabularies were less accurate at linking a verb back to its subject, but they retrieved the subject just as fast and by the same direct-access route as stronger readers.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject auditory multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) task varying how much material separated a subject noun from its verb; Experiment 2 added vocabulary score as a continuous individual-difference predictor.
- N
- N=22 · 22 community participants aged 16-24 in Experiment 2 (the key test); the Methods section of Experiment 1 (university students) is missing from the available text, so its sample size is not stated here.
- Population
- Experiment 1: university students; Experiment 2: non-college-bound young people from the New Haven community with a wide range of vocabulary/reading skill
- Outcome
- Accuracy (d′ and asymptote) and retrieval speed (rate and intercept of SAT functions) for grammaticality judgements of subject-verb dependencies
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Key findings
In both experiments, accuracy fell as more material intervened; in Experiment 2 d′ dropped from 2.41 with no intervening clause to 1.32 with one and 0.73 with two. But retrieval speed was the same for the one- and two-clause sentences and only faster when no retrieval was needed, the signature of direct access rather than a backward search. Higher vocabulary predicted better accuracy overall, but it did not interact with distance and had no effect on any speed parameter.
Methodology
Participants listened to sentences in which a verb was separated from its subject by nothing, by one relative clause, or by two, and judged whether the sentence was acceptable at many response tones, which traces how accuracy grows over processing time. Experiment 1 replicated an earlier reading study with university students using spoken sentences. Experiment 2 tested 22 young adults from the local community across two 3-hour sessions and related their performance to receptive vocabulary (a Peabody vocabulary test) as the index of reading ability.
Limitations
Sentences were heard rather than read, so the study shows poor readers can use direct-access retrieval in listening, not that they do so while reading. The sample was small, which the authors acknowledge limits confidence about the absence of speed differences, and 'reading ability' was measured only by a vocabulary test. The available text also omits the introduction and Experiment 1 methods (including its sample size and example materials), and the abstract's mention of slower retrieval in poor readers does not match the reported null speed effects.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Not yet placed on a claim. This paper has study layers, but no concept page yet cites it as support, challenge, or qualifier.
Related papers in this topic
Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.