MEMORY FOR RELEVANT AND IRRELEVANT INFORMATION - EVIDENCE FOR DEFICIENT INHIBITORY PROCESSES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING DISABLED-CHILDREN/

The present study examined whether language/learning disabled children have greater difficulty than nondisabled children suppressing informa tion that becomes irrelevant during a sentence processing and memory t ask. During study trials, children were asked to predict and remember the terminal nouns for a series of sentences that highly constrained a terminal noun. For half of the study trials; (fillers) the child's pr ediction was confirmed by presenting the child with the expected endin g (e.g., ''Butterflies Ay by flapping their ... wings.''). For the rem aining study trials (critical trials), however, the sentence ending ex pected by the child was disconfirmed with a low-probability ending (ta rget noun). Thus, when presented with the sentence. ''We made a sandwi ch with peanut butter and ...,'' the child's prediction (''jelly'') wa s disconfirmed with a different ending (''bananas''). Memory for the d isconfirmed and target nouns of critical study trials were subsequentl y tested implicitly with a new sentence-completion task. In this case, memory for disconfirmed and target nouns that had been associated wit h individual study sentences were measured in terms of priming effects . The analysis of priming effects indicated that language/learning dis abled children experienced greater difficulty than nondisabled childre n inhibiting the activation of irrelevant information (disconfirmed no uns) and sustaining the activation of relevant information (target nou ns) during a verbal memory task. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for some of the memory and language difficultie s of language/learning disabled children. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc .