Idiosyncratic response patterns among good and poor readers.

Reading skill is considered to be a function of the match of S's response-elaboration patterns to the available cues scanned from the material. It was postulated that poor readers typically respond less consensually than good readers and that both groups make more errors on material which is designed to evoke idiosyncratic patterns of responding. It was found that both good (N = 24) and poor readers (N = 24) in the 5th grade made more errors on stories written in a here-and-now context than on stories in a past-and-far away context; for stories which included affective content, only poor readers showed increases in errors. The poor readers also made fewer consensual responses than did the good readers on a story-completion task and a word-association task. Implications for the reeducation of poor readers were discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)