Story recall and inferencing skills in language/learning-disabled and nondisabled children

Children's ability to recall information and draw inferences from orally presented narratives was examined in sixteen 9- to 10-year-old language/learning-disabled (LLD) children and two groups of normally developing children (sixteen 9- to 10-year-olds and sixteen 6- to 7-year-olds). Short fable-like stories were presented to the children, followed by a series of premise and inference questions (half true and half false). The children were also asked to retell each story in their own words either before or after the question sets. Significant overall differences in performance (p less than .05) were seen between the LLD group and the age-matched control group and between the two control groups. The LLD children did not differ significantly from the younger aged control group. Additionally the LLD group exhibited significantly more disparity between the true and false questions than the age-matched controls. For all the groups, inference questions were significantly more difficult than premise questions. Recall of the story prior to answering questions had no effect on question answering.