Phonological confusability in short-term memory for sentences as a predictor of reading ability

Upon entry to kindergarten, a group of 477 children was given sentence memory tasks involving rhyming and non-rhyming sentences. These tasks were readministered to the children at the end of Grade 1 when the children were also tested for reading ability. Short-term memory for sentences was found to correlate with Grade 1 reading ability on both occasions when it was tested. Furthermore, at both ages the children found rhyming sentences harder to recall than non-rhyming sentences. However, contrary to some previous research, the study failed to find that poor readers were less severely penalized when the short-term memory sentence stimuli rhymed. The possible role of scaling artifacts in producing inconsistent results between studies is discussed.