Phonological similarity neighborhoods and children's short-term memory: typical development and dyslexia

In this article, we explore whether structural characteristics of the phonological lexicon affect serial recall in typically developing and dyslexic children. Recent work has emphasized the importance of long-term phonological representations in supporting short-term memory performance. This occurs via redintegration (reconstruction) processes, which show significant neighborhood density effects in adults. We assessed whether serial recall in children was affected by neighborhood density in word and nonword tasks. Furthermore, we compared dyslexic children with typically developing children of the same age or reading level. Dyslexic children are held to have impaired phonological representations of lexical items. These impaired representations may impair or prevent the use of long-term phonological representations to redintegrate short-term memory traces. We report significant rime neighborhood density effects for serial recall of both words and nonwords, for both dyslexic and typically developing children.