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Abstract

The present experiment investigated the role of subvocalization in learning disabled readers' comprehension difficulties. Nondisabled and learning disabled readers were compared on silent reading and listening comprehension of noun lexical, verb lexical, semantic and inferential sentences under conditions of suppressed and nonsuppressed subvocalization. Compared to nondisabled readers learning disabled readers were inferior in comprehension when required to combine concepts and integrate ideas. However, the two groups were comparable in comprehension of noun and verb lexical sentences when allowed to subvocalize. For both reading groups subvocalization was found to be necessary for comprehension of individual words; however, suppression of subvocalization did not interfere with the integration of ideas. Three hypotheses were offered to account for disabled readers' comprehension performance. The results are best interpreted as an extended working-memory hypothesis supporting the theory that learning disabled readers' deficient semantic knowledge impairs their use of subvocalization strategies.

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Effects of Subvocal Suppression on Learning Disabled Readers' Sentence Comprehension

Abstract

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References