The Relationship between Learning Disability and Simultaneous-Successive Processing

Abstract

A heterogeneous group of learning disabled children and a relatively homogeneous group having specific reading deficits were compared with normal children in two studies. In the first experiment the learning disabled children were subdivided into hyperactive, hypoactive, and the balanced types as judged from teachers' ratings of the child's classroom behavior. Whereas the learning disabled, as a group, performed poorly in a few of the simultaneous-successive tasks in comparison with the normal children, there were no distinct differences among the groups. In the second experiment only those children who demonstrated specific reading deficits were selected. They were comparable in age and IQ with the normal children. On the simultaneous-successive tasks they were inferior to the normals, as they were also in dichotic listening. Since IQ was not a variable, it was concluded that the inferior performance of the reading deficit group was not due to poorer intelligence; rather, the difficulty may lie in the strategies that need to be chosen when the child is faced with a somewhat unfamiliar task.