Pixel International Conferences

Learning a second/foreign language is a challenging process for the memory capacity of all students. This task becomes even more challenging for students with Learning Disabilities (LD) as they are weak in short and long-term memory. This study wishes to contribute to this field and aims at investigating the short and long-term retention of: a) individual words and b) multi-word items in Typically Developing (TD) children and children with Learning Disabilities (LD). It was hypothesized that the meaning of multi-word items would be better retained in memory compared to individual words.
The participants were fifty-two English language learners (33 TD and 19 LD) aged from 9 to 12. A hyperlinked computerized text was provided with morphosyntactic information for the 10 items (six individual words and four multi-word items) and retention scores were then examined in short and long-term memory.
The results indicated statistically significant between group differences in both tasks with TD children performing significantly better than the LD group. As regards within group differences, the retention percentages of the multi-word items were higher (though not statistically significant) than those of the individual words in both short and long-term memory in both groups.

Keywords: learning disabilities, foreign/second language vocabulary, short-term memory, long-term memory, multi-word items;