Current Pediatric Research

Memory is the mental ability of an organism to acquire, store, retain and retrieve information. In order to assess memory, speech language pathologists consider confrontational naming as an effective method. Semantic memory, a part of explicit long term memory, has been assessed in various groups of children. Including bilingual and monolingual, children with down syndrome, specific language impairment, developmental dyslexia. In Indian context, analyses of semantic association in mental lexicon revealed faster judgment in semantically associated word pairs relative to the un-associated pairs. Also, among school children, high performers perform significantly better in semantic memory tasks relative to low performers. However, the literature confirms a narrow research work available on demonstrating the relation between semantic memory and language processing. Thus, present study aimed at measuring the accuracy and response times for lexical items, through semantic memory, in a group of school going “at risk” learning disabled children. The results illustrated a good performance of “at risk” learning disabled group when lexical items were accessed through semantic memory tasks. Overall results of “at risk” learning disabled children seem to be similar to the high performing typically developing children and are much higher than typically developing low performers in terms of both accuracy and speed of responses.

Author(s): Ramandeep Kaur*

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