Lorsbach TC, Wilson S, Reimer JF
Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Contemp Educ Psychol. 1996 Oct;21(4):447-66. doi: 10.1006/ceps.1996.0030.
The present study examined whether language/learning disabled children have greater difficulty than nondisabled children suppressing information that becomes irrelevant during a sentence processing and memory task. 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 prediction was confirmed by presenting the child with the expected ending (e.g., "Butterflies fly by flapping their . . . wings."). For the remaining study trials (critical trials), however, the sentence ending expected by the child was disconfirmed with a low-probability ending (target noun). Thus, when presented with the sentence, "We made a sandwich with peanut butter and . . . ," the child's prediction ("jelly") was disconfirmed with a different ending ("bananas"). Memory for the disconfirmed and target nouns of critical study trials were subsequently tested implicitly with a new sentence-completion task. In this case, memory for disconfirmed and target nouns that had been associated with individual study sentences were measured in terms of priming effects. The analysis of priming effects indicated that language/learning disabled children experienced greater difficulty than nondisabled children inhibiting the activation of irrelevant information (disconfirmed nouns) and sustaining the activation of relevant information (target nouns) during a verbal memory task. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for some of the memory and language difficulties of language/learning disabled children.
本研究考察了语言/学习障碍儿童在句子处理和记忆任务中抑制变得无关的信息时，是否比非障碍儿童有更大的困难。在学习试验中，要求儿童预测并记住一系列对结尾名词有高度限制的句子的结尾名词。在一半的学习试验（填充试验）中，通过向儿童呈现预期的结尾（例如，“蝴蝶通过扇动它们的……翅膀飞行。”）来证实儿童的预测。然而，在其余的学习试验（关键试验）中，儿童预期的句子结尾被一个低概率的结尾（目标名词）所否定。因此，当呈现句子“我们用花生酱和……做了一个三明治”时，儿童的预测（“果冻”）被一个不同的结尾（“香蕉”）所否定。随后，用一个新的句子完成任务对关键学习试验中被否定的名词和目标名词的记忆进行了隐性测试。在这种情况下，根据启动效应来测量与各个学习句子相关的被否定名词和目标名词的记忆。启动效应分析表明，在言语记忆任务中，语言/学习障碍儿童在抑制无关信息（被否定名词）的激活和维持相关信息（目标名词）的激活方面比非障碍儿童有更大的困难。根据这些结果对语言/学习障碍儿童的一些记忆和语言困难的影响进行了讨论。
