Individual differences in semantic and structural errors in children’s memory for sentences

© 2003, British Psychological Society. All rights reserved. Children with poor reading comprehension in spite of good reading accuracy (poor comprehenders), have unimpaired phonological short-term memory and show normal memory for lists of words. The present paper explores poor comprehenders’ immediate memory for meaningful sentences. Poor comprehenders were worse at sentence repetition than controls and an error analysis revealed a qualitative difference in the nature of errors made by the two groups. The groups made a similar proportion of errors which altered the sentence structure; however, the poor comprehenders’ errors were more likely to alter the meaning of the target sentence than those made by the controls. This finding is discussed in terms of the educational implications of poor memory for meaning-based information in poor comprehenders.