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Abstract

Fifty-five poor readers and fifty-eight normal readers from grade six were presented a modified version of Hamill's (1976) tone pattern-phrase matching procedure. Each student selected from two type-written alternatives the phrase which appeared to match an auditory tone pattern. Consistent with Hamill's adults, subjects tended to choose phrases which matched long tone durations to content words and short durations to function words. Although both reading groups displayed this tendency, it was more prominent in the normal readers. These results cannot be explained on the basis of knowledge of word importance, because on a second task poor readers were better able to identify important words in phrases than were normal readers.

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References

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Duration-Syntax Association in Normal and Poor Readers

Abstract

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