Iconic and Echoic Memory in Children with Learning Disability

Abstract

The present study compared the iconic memory and echoic memory in children with learning disability (LD).A total of 35 subjects participated in the study. The subjects were divided into two groups. Group I consisted of fifteen children with LD and group II consisted of twenty normal children. All the subjects belonged to an age range of 8-12 years. Standardized line drawn pictures of frequently occurring nouns were taken as stimuli from Early Language Training Kit (Karanth, 1999).

The study consisted of two tasks; first task was to check iconic memory, while the second task was to check echoic memory. For task one, fifteen slides were made with each slide having one picture. The participants were instructed in Kannada as “We will show you some pictures on the computer screen one after the other. At the end you have to name all the pictures which you have seen”. A score of '1' was given for each correct verbal response and '0' for an incorrect response. For task two, the names of the nouns (which were used in the task one) were uttered by a female native speaker of Kannada and were recorded using a SONY Digital IC recorder (ICD-P320). The recorded sample served as the stimulus. Scoring was similar to that of the task one. Results revealed that children with learning disability performed poorly in both iconic and echoic memory task compared to normal. Hence, the presence of poor memory should be considered during assessment, therapy and also while making therapeutic prognosis of children with learning disability.