Siegel L S, Ryan E B
Department of Special Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada.
Child Dev. 1989 Aug;60(4):973-80. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1989.tb03528.x.
Working memory has been proposed as an important component of reading and arithmetic skills. The development of working memory was studied in normally achieving and subtypes of learning disabled children. The performance of reading disabled (RD), arithmetic disabled (ARITHD), and attentional deficit disordered (ADD) children, age 7-13, was compared to normal achievers (NA) on 2 working memory tasks, 1 involving sentences and the other involving counting. There was a significant growth of working memory as a function of age. In addition, the RD children had significantly lower scores on both tasks. The ARITHD children had significantly lower scores only on the Working Memory--Counting task, and the ADD group had scores similar to the normally achieving children except at the youngest age level in the Working Memory--Sentences task. Thus, a reading disability appears to involve a generalized deficit in working memory. Children with an arithmetic disability do not have a generalized language deficit but have a specific working memory deficit in relation to processing numerical information. As children with ADD did not have deficits in these tasks, working memory may not have significant attentional components. An important component of the development of reading and computational arithmetic skills appears to be the growth of working memory for language and numerical information.
工作记忆被认为是阅读和算术技能的一个重要组成部分。研究了正常发展儿童以及学习障碍儿童亚型的工作记忆发展情况。将7至13岁的阅读障碍（RD）、算术障碍（ARITHD）和注意力缺陷障碍（ADD）儿童在两项工作记忆任务上的表现与正常发展儿童（NA）进行了比较，一项任务涉及句子，另一项任务涉及计数。工作记忆随年龄增长有显著发展。此外，RD儿童在两项任务上的得分均显著较低。ARITHD儿童仅在工作记忆——计数任务上得分显著较低，而ADD组的得分与正常发展儿童相似，只是在工作记忆——句子任务的最年幼年龄组除外。因此，阅读障碍似乎涉及工作记忆的普遍缺陷。患有算术障碍的儿童没有普遍的语言缺陷，但在处理数字信息方面存在特定的工作记忆缺陷。由于患有ADD的儿童在这些任务中没有缺陷，工作记忆可能不包含重要的注意力成分。阅读和计算算术技能发展的一个重要组成部分似乎是语言和数字信息工作记忆的发展。
