Auditory and visual sequential memory of Down syndrome and nonretarded children.

The study was designed to investigate auditory and visual sequential memory of mentally retarded individuals. Experiment 1, conducted with Down syndrome children and adolescents, replicated previous findings of poor auditory sequential memory on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. In Experiment 2, nonretarded kindergarteners showed superior recall of auditory items on a more comparable set of auditory and visual tasks. These same tasks, administered to the Down syndrome sample in Experiment 3, supported the earlier finding that retarded individuals have difficulty recalling auditorially presented verbal material. Their difficulty, however, did not appear to be linked to the sequential nature of recall. We suggested that the auditory-visual recall difference evidenced by nonretarded but not by retarded subjects may have been due to the differential use of information in echoic memory.