Poor performance on the retention of phonemes’ serial order in short-term memory reflects young children’s poor reading skills

The present study aimed to identify crucial factors that underlie phonological representations in short-term memory (STM) of third-graders with different literacy skills. For this purpose, we used the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT) to disentangle the processing of phonemes’ identity and their serial order. We found no evidence that children’s literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ identity. However, their literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ serial order. The latter link can be interpreted in terms of a domain-general STM mechanism but is also compatible with the impact of literacy on children’s knowledge of the phonotactic regularities in a language.status: publishe