Four experiments are reported which are part of a systematic research program designed to develop understanding of the cognitive processing difficulties of learning disabled (LD) children who perform poorly on short-term memory tasks. Subjects were 8 LD children with extreme memory difficulties, 8 LD children with average short-term memory skills, and 8 average children from the regular classroom. These studies provide new evidence about the generality of the memory difficulties shown by children in the target subgroup; they are limited to verbatim recall of familiar stimuli, but they involve difficulties in recalling both item and order information. Further, these recall difficulties appear to be related to inefficiencies in the use of phonological coding processes.
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