Effects of visual and auditory distractors on learning disabled and normal children's recognition memory performance

Investigated whether distractibility in learning disabled (LD) children could be predicted on the basis of diagnosed visual and auditory learning deficits. 26 children in Grades 2-4 were classified as having visual or auditory reading disorders on the basis of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. They and 17 normally achieving children from the same grades performed visual and auditory recognition memory tasks with visual or auditory distractors presented on 80% of the trials. Analysis of error frequencies revealed that with distractors, Ss in the 2 LD groups made more errors and did not improve over trials as much as control Ss. However, the predicted interaction between learning disability modality and task or distractor modality did not obtain. Rather, all 3 S groups made more errors when task and distractor were in the same modality. (20 ref)