Individual differences in the representation of sentences in memory.

A cued recall procedure was used to assess the nature of the memory representation that underlies the ability of mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals to remember single sentences. Mentally retarded, equal-CA, and equal-MA subjects listened to a list of sentences after which their ability to recall the object noun of the sentence was assessed when they were provided recall cues that contained (a) only the subject noun of the original sentence, (b) only the verb of the sentence, or (c) both the subject and verb. As expected, performance for all groups was best when they were provided the subject plus verb cue relative to the single word cues.

The instantiation of general terms by deaf adolescents/adults.

Two studies were conducted using severely and profoundly deaf high school students to determine their ability to instantiate particular exemplars of general nouns and to use those instantiations as retrieval cues. The results indicated that the deaf adolescents/adults could instantiate when asked to do so but did not do so spontaneously; sentence recall was best when the retrieval cue matched the word used in the original sentence; and recall of sentences in which all information was explicit was better than of sentences in which some information had to be inferred. Impoverished semantic representations, difficulty in integrating semantic representations, and insufficient strategy use were suggested as possible alternative and competing explanations for the obtained results.

Sources of difficulty in the solution of verbal arithmetic problems by mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals.

Effects of several logical (i.e., operation type and amount of extraneous information), memory (i.

Semantic processing can facilitate free recall in mildly retarded adolescents.

The efficacy of semantic processing in free recall was investigated in two experiments with EMR adolescents. In Experiment 1, they were taught to use one of two semantic strategies for memorizing a 15-word list. Compared with controls, neither strategy helped recall either in original learning or transfer.

Comprehension and recall of sentences by mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals.

A cued sentence-recall task was used to determine the extent to which 24 mildly mentally retarded adolescents and 24 equal-MA nonretarded children differed in their ability to recall sentences and to infer and utilize particular exemplars of general nouns as retrieval cues. We found that the sentence recall performance of the retarded adolescents was poor relative to that of the nonretarded children; however, both groups found general and particular cues to be equally effective retrieval aids for target sentences. Differential sentence reconstruction and editing strategies were suggested as possible sources of the obtained recall differences.