Studies of Children with Learning Disabilities Who Perform Poorly on Memory Span Tasks

Abstract

This paper describes an extended series of studies focusing on a relatively small subgroup of children with learning disabilities (LD). Children in the subgroup (which constitutes about 15% to 20% of school identified children with LD) have approximately average general intelligence, but perform in the retarded range on tasks that require immediate verbatim recall of sequences of verbal information. Data are provided concerning the severity, stability, and breadth of their memory performance deficits. Experimental analyses of their performance deficits suggest that they result from inefficiency in coding, or representing, the phonological features of language. Further experiments are reported that study the effects of this specific processing difficulty on the performance of complex academic tasks. The primary academic limitation of children in the subgroup appears to involve acquisition of fluent word identification, or word analysis skills. The last section of the paper contains a discussion of remedial implications and future research directions.