This report investigated the various types of memory intrusion errors of adults with language learning disability (LLD) in comparison to age- and gender-matched typically developing (TD) adults using lists that are specifically designed to induce memory intrusions adapted from Roediger and McDermott (1995) and modified by Watson et al. (2001; 2003). The 28 participants between the ages of 18:9 - 24:3 listened to pre-recorded lists of twelve words that converged on a critical lure either semantically, phonologically, or dually with a hybrid list. This report tested the hypotheses that 1) hybrid lists would be more likely to induce memory intrusions of the critical lure than either semantic or phonological lists for each group; 2) adults with LLD would demonstrate more intrusion errors than their TD counterparts; 3) the error profiles of the LLD and TD groups should be largely similar; however, the adults with LLD might show deficits in extracting the semantic gist of word lists in light of such patterns in children with specific language impairment (Sheng & McGregor, 2010a). Results showed that the hybrid lists induced the greatest number of critical lure intrusions producing a super-additive effect. Contrary to our hypothesis, the LLD group did not produce more memory intrusions than the TD group. The fact that the two groups performed similarly on all standardized measures suggests that the participants with LLD may have outgrown their disability. Results also revealed that interference and intrusions increased when there was an increase in phonological similarity among words for both groups. Lastly, our preliminary evidence suggests that adults with LLD are not as efficient as their TD counterparts at extracting the gist of semantically-related words. The inclusion of a greater number of participants may provide stronger support for the hypothesis that lexical-semantic organization is less efficient in young adults with LLD. / text

In order to spell fluently and accurately, phonology, orthography, and morphology must be integrated and stored into long term memory (Berninger & Richards, in press; Berninger, Nagy, Tanimoto, Thompson, Abbott, 2015). Children with dysgraphia, dyslexia, and OWL-LD have specific deficits in linguistic processing that impede the cross-mapping of these linguistic elements. This study analyzes the frequency and nature of spelling errors produced by children with dysgraphia, dyslexia, and OWL-LD during an academic writing task in order to determine if known deficits in linguistic processing affect the type and severity of spelling errors made by these children. The present study analyzed error severity and frequency of spelling errors produced by children with dysgraphia (n=13), dyslexia (n=17), or OWL-LD (n=5) during the academic writing tasks obtained in the Berninger et al. (2015) study. In the previous study, students read or listened to computerized lessons about basic mathematical concepts and then typed summaries of what they learned. For the current study, all spelling errors made during the typed summary writing tasks were extracted and analyzed using the Phonological, Orthographic, Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS) and then recoded with POMplexity (a measure of error severity) to determine the severity and frequency of spelling errors made in the linguistic categories of phonology, orthography, and morphology. Results indicated that the students did not differ in error severity by diagnostic category. However, a qualitative analysis using the POMAS revealed that children from different diagnostic categories produced different types of errors. With respect to error frequency, only students with dysgraphia made significantly fewer errors than students with OWL-LD, and all participants, regardless of diagnostic category produced more errors in typed summaries following the reading condition. These results are consistent with previous research indicating that children with learning disabilities do not produce deviant spelling errors when compared to typically-developing, age-matched peers or typically-developing, spelling-matched peers (Silliman, Bahr, and Peters, 2006, among others). The current results demonstrate that the spelling errors of children with learning disabilities reflect the expected linguistic breakdowns in cross-code mapping, and that children with learning disabilities may display these spelling deficits beyond an appropriate age.