Kids who were poorer at reading but had good intelligence, then found that they had bad memory span (couldn't remember things that well in STM) and bad on phonological awareness tests (decoding phonemes) - the two latter things is the function of the AL. There's a relationship between reading, memory span and phonological awareness (do they have poor reading BECAUSE of memory span & PA? well i guess they can't say "because" bc its correlational). - so AL is for reading, bc kids who can't read have deficits in the processes that the AL controls for, hence, their AL may be damaged; thus, their reading problems probably due to their AL damage.