Poor readers, good readers, and normal readers referred for school problems shadowed single prose passages presented to one ear and competing prose passages presented simultaneously one to each ear. Poor readers had particular difficulty shadowing prose material when a competing, distracting message was present and when the difficulty level of the passage was high. Normal readers with school behavior problems showed a nonspecific performance deficit. All groups showed a significant right ear advantage. These results suggest that a specific attention deficit may account for poor readers' performance on verbal tasks.
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