Selective impairment of educationally subnormal children's delayed memory for text

Abstract

We have tested the ability of educationally subnormal (ESN) children to recall information from a short story, both immediately, and after a delay of 1 week. Their performance was compared with that of two normal groups: one matched for chronological age, the other matched for reading age. In the immediate test, despite differences in the overall level of recall, all three groups showed a similar pattern of recall for important and unimportant information. However, while both normal groups showed a reliable bias towards recalling more important than unimportant information in the delayed test, the ESN group showed no such effect of importance in their delayed recall. This finding suggests that ESN children may fail to utilize differences in importance in consolidating their memory for text.