Short-term memory processes in children with reading and arithmetic learning disabilities.

Abstract

The role of phonemic coding in short-term memory was studied in 45 children with a reading disability, 38 children with a specific arithmetic disability, and 89 children who were achieving normally in school. The children, aged 7 to 13, were administered a series of tasks that involved the visual or auditory presentation of rhyming and nonrhyming letters and either an oral or a written response. The youngest children (7 to 8 years) with a reading disability did not show any difference between the recall of nonrhyming and rhyming letters, whereas the normal children of the same age did. The older reading disabled children (9-13), like their normal counterparts, had significantly poorer recall of rhyming as opposed to nonrhyming letters. However, their overall levels of performance were significantly lower than normals. The same pattern was found with children with arithmetic disabilities for the visual presentation of stimuli. For the auditory presentation of stimuli, the performance of children with arithmetic disabilities resembled that of the normal children, except at the youngest ages in the study. Whereas a deficiency in phonological coding may characterize the younger children with learning disabilities, older children with learning disabilities appear to be using a phonemic code but have a more general deficit in short-term memory.