The effects of central processing strategies on learning disabled, mildly retarded, average, and gifted children's elaborative encoding abilities.

The purpose of these studies was to examine potential central processing strategy differences among subgroups of children on a series of elaborative encoding tasks. To this end, two experiments included four ability groups (slow learners, learning disabled, average, and intellectually gifted children) who recalled words embedded in sentences. In general, the results suggest that lower verbal and learning ability subgroups recalled less information during elaboratorive encoding conditions than higher ability groups. More importantly, however, the results indicated that lower ability groups differed from higher ability groups in how they shared, discriminated, and selectively allocated resources between the central and secondary recall tasks. The results were discussed within a framework that views individual differences in encoding as reflecting central processing (i.e., resource monitoring) deficiencies.