Language Comprehension in Learning Disabled Children Who Perform Poorly on Memory Span Tests

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.