Children with developmental dyslexia (DD) may differ from typical readers in aspects other than reading. The notion of a general deficit in the ability to acquire and retain procedural ("how to") knowledge as long-term procedural memory has been proposed. Here, we compared the ability of elementary school children, with and without…

The study involving 85 sixth through ninth graders tested J. Torgesen's hypothesis that learning disabled (LD) children's performance deficits occur as a result of a "passive" approach to tasks rather than a cognitive processing deficit as assumed by other existing definitions. LD students were matched with nonhandicapped peers and administered…

Following pretraining on three figures, 44 nonhandicapped preschoolers were assigned to experimental groups to investigate methods of integrating a new, similar symbol into a set of familiar symbols to approximate the difficult disciminations encountered by young children in school. (Author)

The study indicated that remediation of a broad spectrum lower level skill can enhance the ability of the learning disabled to perform academic tasks which incorporate that skill, even without specific remediation of the academic skills themselves. (SBH)

Stimulus overselectivity refers to the phenomenon whereby stimulus control over behavior is exerted only by a limited subset of the total number of stimuli present during discrimination learning. It often is displayed by individuals with autistic spectrum disorders or learning disabilities, but is not exclusive to those groups. The present studies…

To examine intra- and interhemispheric communication or the transfer of information within and between the cerebral hemispheres, 32 right-handed learning disabled children aged 8-10 years, 11-13 years, and 14-16 years were presented a tactile discrimination task. Fabrics of the same or different texture were presented to the same hand (uncrossed…

Two studies with 33 reading-disabled and 31 non-reading-disabled second through fourth graders indicate that young disabled readers may not be able to hold phonemic information in their memories long enough to make adequate discrimination of phonological information within syllables. (SLD)

This study of two primary-grade students with learning disabilities and behavior problems found that an instructional package incorporating videotaped self-assessment, self-modeling, discrimination training, and behavioral rehearsal helped the children acquire cooperative classroom behaviors and generalize and maintain those behaviors. (Author/JDD)

Compared the processing of rapid auditory stimuli on two-tone auditory discrimination tasks by 7- to 11-year-olds with learning impairments (LI) and those without learning impairments (non-LI). Found that LI children committed more errors, but the effects of timing were comparable. Obtained same results with a sample of good and poor readers. Task…