Naturalistic memory in learning disabled children. Learning Disability Quarterly

Abstract. This study investigated the generalizability of LD children's working memory deficits to naturalistic tasks. Tasks included questionnaire items about recall strategies and the recall of everyday features, early school information, consequential events, and misleading information; the working memory measure was Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) sentence span test. Results indicate that LD children are deficient on working memory and naturalistic measures, but their naturalistic memory deficits do not appear to relate to consequential or suggestible recall tasks. Weak intercorrela-tions were found between the memory measures, suggesting that working and naturalistic memory reflects independent memory systems. It was concluded that disabled children's deficient memory performance in a natural context is somewhat in-dependent of working memory problems, except when the naturalistic measures (ie., questionnaire items) assess intentional recall. Deficits in naturalistic memory were less apparent for salient and contextually meaningful information. Deficits in memory are among the most frequent-ly demonstrated psychological consequences of