Language comprehension in learning disabled children who perform poorly on memory span tests.

Abstract

In this article, we report three studies of language comprehension skills in 9-and 10-year-old learning disabled (LD) children who have extreme difficulties retaining brief sequences of verbal information. In all studies, the performance of this subgroup of LD children is contrasted with other LD subjects who perform normally on memory span tests and with normally achieving subjects. In Experiment 1 we showed that although children in the target subgroup had difficulties remembering the specific words and word order used in expository passages, they were not different from the two control groups in their comprehension of the passages. In Experiment 2 we showed that the gist recall of idea units from two folk tales was equally influenced in all groups by the thematic importance of the idea units being recalled. The primary inference was that the groups comprehended the stories equally well. The results of Experiment 3 showed that children in the subgroup with memory limitations had more difficulty than children in the other two groups in following simple directions involving the manipulation of blocks. They were impaired in their ability to follow sequences of directions whether order of execution was important or not. Both the theoretical and practical importance of these findings are discussed.

Cognitive skills and literacy performance of Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia

“…These difficulties are likely to affect readers’ ability to encode printed words, to manipulate the word structures and to analyze the meaning of morphologically complex words. Moreover, adolescents with dyslexia have short-term verbal memory (Torgesen et al, 1987 ; Wijsman et al, 2000 ) and long-term working memory difficulties (Hulme, 1981 ) that cause problems in creating word representations in memory and retrieving them from memory. Other studies reported that the manifestations of cognitive deficits can change over the life span (Bruck, 1990 ; Nation & Snowling, 1998 ).…”

Information seeking on Bayesian conditional probability problems: A fuzzy‐trace theory account

“…Asking subjects to describe stimuli in their own words is a common approach to assessing gist in research on memory and comprehension (e.g. Adams et al, 1990;Langer et al, 1987;Torgesen et al, 1988). However, in this research, memorial limitations were not an issue since each item was presented verbatim at the time of gist assessment.…”

Verbal coding deficits in learning-disabled readers: A multiple stage model

“…In contrast, several recent studies (e.g., Ceci et aL, 1980;Torgesen et al, 1987;Vellutino and Scanlon, 1985, 1987a, 1987b) have implicated verbal coding as a stable processing disability in various subgroups (e.g., reading) of LD children. Support for the verbal coding dificit hypothesis is most evident, however, in Vellutino's work (see Vellutino, 1977;Scanlon, 1982, 1987a).…”