Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine whether learning disabled readers' impaired verbal coding was related to storage and/or retrieval operations. To this end, learning disabled and skilled readers viewed nonsense pictures without names or with names that emphasized the semantic aspects of the picture or names that were not associated with the pictorial representation. An analysis of first-choice responses on a probe-recall task indicated that skilled readers were superior to disabled readers on the semantic training conditions. No significant recall differences occurred between reading groups on unnamed and named-nonassociated conditions. An analysis of second-choice responses (when the first choice response was incorrect) on several dependent measures found minimal recall advantage for skilled compared to disabled readers. An analysis of memory trace structure (Tulving & Watkins, 1975) suggested that ability groups vary in the coding strategies they use to represent information and that such differences may influence item availability during first-choice responding. Results were interpreted as suggesting that disabled readers' verbal coding operations reflect a reduction in the availability, as opposed to accessibility, of previously stored information.
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