Fluency affects verbal working memory primarily through which mechanism?

• A. Fluency supports verbal working memory by helping students articulate more rapidly
• B. Fluency reduces the need for articulation
• C. Fluency only affects decoding
• D. Fluency hinders working memory

Answer: (A)

Fluency affects verbal working memory by speeding up how quickly a reader can articulate or subvocalize the words they see. When reading becomes fluent, the inner voice can rehearse the sounds of the words more rapidly, which keeps phonological information alive in the verbal working memory longer and more efficiently. This rehearsal—part of the phonological loop in working memory—lets more words or sequence items be held at once, so decoding and understanding can proceed with less cognitive effort.

In practical terms, fast articulation frees cognitive resources that would otherwise be tied up in sounding out words, allowing more capacity to process meaning and remember what was just read. The idea isn’t that articulation isn’t needed, but that its speed enhances memory maintenance. The other options either misstate the role of articulation in memory, or overlook that fluency’s main impact is on the maintenance of phonological information, not solely on decoding or on hindering memory.