A comparison of three methods of reading-while-listening

This study tries to distinguish between the effects of spoken text in reading-while-listening (RwL) and those of text repetition by determining whether repeated RwL of the same text leads to better results than RwL of different texts. Moreover, it is investigated whether the results of RwL can be improved by asking the reader to detect mismatches between written and spoken texts. Subjects were 36 young backward readers (25 boys, 11 girls) from the Netherlands. Mean age was 111 months. With all three methods a practice effect was found for texts as well as for single words. Reading the same text, however, did not lead to better results than reading different texts. Nor were the effects of RwL of different texts improved by mismatch detection. Only the reading speed for the training texts increased following text repetition and mismatch detection.