The Role of Interference in the Verbal Retention Ability of Learning Disabled Children

Abstract

Three groups of learning disabled children defined on the basis of their Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children test profiles, and one control group of normal readers, were asked to retain verbal material across distractor intervals ranging from 0 to 24 s. The to-be-retained material consisted of word triads presented either visually (in one half of the conditions) or auditorily (in the other half). Six distractor tasks were designed to vary the level of similarity between the memoranda and distraction. Three of these distractor tasks were auditory, three visual. In each modality, one task required nonverbal analysis, one phonemic analysis, and one semantic analysis. In addition, two unfilled distractor intervals were also introduced; one following auditory, and one after visual presentation of the to-be-retained materials. Each child participated in each of the eight conditions. All three LD groups retained less information than the normals following phonemic or semantic distractors in either modality. However, their performance following nonverbal distraction or no distraction was nearly normal. It was concluded that LD children's retention of verbal material is more susceptible to interference from similar material than is the case for normals.