Sn. Mattson et Ep. Riley, Implicit and explicit memory functioning in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure, J INT NEURO, 5(5), 1999, pp. 462-471
Citations number
45
Categorie Soggetti
Neurology
Journal title
JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Prenatal alcohol exposure is associated with widespread and devastating neu
rodevelopmental deficits. Numerous reports have suggested memory deficits i
n both humans and animals exposed prenatally to alcohol. However, the natur
e of these memory deficits remains to be characterized. Recently children w
ith fetal alcohol syndrome were shown to have learning and memory deficits
on a verbal learning and memory measure that involved free recall and recog
nition memory. The current study seeks to further characterize memory funct
ioning in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure by evaluating primi
ng performance. The choice of task is also relevant given previous studies
of memory performance in patient groups with and without involvement of the
basal ganglia, a group of structures known to be affected in fetal alcohol
syndrome. Three groups were evaluated for lexical priming, free recall, re
cognition memory, and verbal fluency: (1) children with heavy prenatal alco
hol exposure; (2) children with Down syndrome; and (3) nonexposed controls.
The children with Down syndrome showed significantly less priming than alc
ohol-exposed children, who did not differ from controls. In addition, the a
lcohol-exposed children were impaired on the free recall task but not on th
e recognition memory task, whereas the children with Down syndrome performe
d significantly worse than the alcohol-exposed group on both tasks. Finally
, on the verbal fluency task, children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure
were impaired on both category and letter fluency, but the degree of impai
rment was greater for letter fluency. These results further characterize th
e memory deficits in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure suggesti
ng that in spite of learning and, memory deficits, they are able to benefit
from priming of verbal information.