Phonemic support in comprehension: comparisons between children with and without mild mental retardation.

Whether children with and without mild mental retardation matched on word recognition skills rely similarly on phonemic processes during comprehension was examined. In a word memory task, children with mental retardation showed no decrement in performance with phonemically similar word lists, whereas children without mental retardation recalled fewer words from lists containing phonemically similar words. In a listening comprehension task, both groups evidenced similar decreases in accuracy when sentences contained phonemically similar words. In a reading comprehension task, although neither group evidenced effects of phonemic similarity, children with mental retardation read more slowly overall. Results suggest that ineffective use of phonemic coding in working memory may contribute to comprehension difficulties of children with mental retardation.