Processing deficiencies of learning-disabled children who perform poorly on the digit span test.

Conducted 8 experiments to determine which of several theoretically relevant variables (attention, motivation, mnemonic strategies, and subprocessing skills) could account for the poor performance of some learning-disabled children on tests of short-term auditory memory such as the Digit Span subtest of the Revised WISC. Ss were 8 learning-disabled children who performed in the retarded range on the Digit Span subtest, 8 learning-disabled children who performed normally on the test, and 8 average children from the regular classroom. Although there appeared to be subtle differences among Ss in the use of certain consciously applied mnemonic strategies, the major proportion of the recall differences among groups appeared to be due to the inability of one group of learning-disabled children to establish efficient mnemonic codes for highly familiar stimuli. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)