Word length, phonemic, and visual similarity effects in poor and normal readers

Serial order recall for visually and auditorily presented stimuli was examined in a group of 12-year-old poor readers and 7-year-old reading-age controls. With pictorial presentation, the poor readers showed a visual similarity effect, no word length effect, and a smaller phonemic similarity effect than that of controls. However, with visual presentation of printed words and with auditory presentation, poor readers showed word length and phonemic similarity effects of similar magnitude to that of controls. It is concluded that poor readers rely on visual information in tasks where the presented images are highly codable, and where verbal recoding is not obligatory, but that they will make use of phonological coding when the stimuli are not as easily codable visually in memory.