Many studies show that poor readers make more errors in nonword repetition than better readers. Although this finding is generally linked to the lower quality of poor readers’ phonological representations in verbal short-term memory, the nature of this poor performance remains unclear. We addressed this issue by focusing on two types of phoneme-related performance in a nonword repetition task: (a) recall of phonemes irrespective of their serial order (phoneme identity) and (b) recall of correctly reproduced phonemes’ serial order (serial order). We tested 91 young adults with and without dyslexia. Generalized linear mixed-effects models demonstrated that controls outperformed individuals with dyslexia in the recall of phonemes’ serial order but failed to detect a difference in the recall of phonemes’ identity. These findings are discussed not only in terms of the nature of or access to phonological representations but also in terms of another concept that has recently been advanced in the literature: a specialized serial order mechanism in verbal short-term memory. We also consider the possibility that individuals with dyslexia may be less sensitive to phonotactic constraints.

This study compared NRT-performance in monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish–Dutch third-graders using a Dutch Nonword Repetition Task (NRT). Several novel response analyses at the phoneme level were applied to further understand the earlier reported overall accuracy differences in NRT-performance between bilinguals and monolinguals. Analyses in which the retention of phonemes and the retention of their serial order were disentangled revealed that monolinguals outperform bilinguals with respect to the retention of the phonemes themselves. However, both groups did not differ in their retention of the serial order of correctly recalled phonemes. Furthermore, this study confirms that expressive vocabulary skills do affect overall NRT-performance. The results are discussed in light of current short-term memory (STM) models and the role of long-term phonological knowledge in NRT tasks.

Dutch–English participants named words and nonwords with a between-language phonologically inconsistent rime, e.g., GREED and PREED, and control words with a language-typical rime, e.g., GROAN, in a monolingual stimulus list or in a mixed list containing Dutch words. Inconsistent items had longer latencies and more errors than typical items in the mixed lists but not in the pure list. The consistency effect depended on word frequency, but not on language membership, lexicality, or instruction. Instruction did affect the relative speed and number of errors in the two languages. The consistency effect is the consequence of the simultaneous activation of two sublexical codes in the bilinguals' two languages and its size depends on the activation rate of the associated lexical representations (high-frequency words versus low-frequency words and nonwords) and on the decision criteria that monitor the response conflict at the decision level: the timing for responding (time criterion) in each language depends on the composition of the stimulus list and the likelihood of responses in either language.

To investigate decision level processes involved in bilingual word recognition tasks, Dutch–English participants had to name Dutch–English homographs in English. In a stimulus list containing items from both languages, interlingual homographs yielded longer naming latencies, more Dutch responses, and more other errors in both response languages if they had a high-frequency Dutch reading. Dutch naming latencies were slower than or equally slow as English naming latencies. In a stimulus list containing only English words and homographs, there was no homograph effect in naming latencies, although homographs did elicit more errors than control words. The results are interpreted as the consequence of list-induced variability in the competition between lexical items of the two languages involved. In addition, two additional decision processes have to be assumed: a language check, and a response deadline for non-target-language responses.