The Short-term Memory Ability of Children with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Three groups of learning disabled children, defined on the basis of their Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children profiles, and one control group of normal readers were asked to retain verbal material across distractor intervals ranging from zero to 18 seconds. None of the learning disabled groups (low verbal, high performance; high verbal, low performance; verbal equals performance) performed worse on this task than the normal controls. Furthermore, the older learning disabled children in the high-verbal, low-performance group actually retained somewhat more material than the normal control group. It was concluded that at least on this standard version of a short-term retention assessment task, learning disabled children are not at a significant disadvantage.

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