Effect of Cognitive Effort on Learning Disabled and Nondisabled Readers' Recall

Learning disabled and nondisabled readers can be distinguished by the extent to which their free recall of words is affected by the attention demand characteristics (cognitive effort) of items. An intentional auditory free recall task was presented after nondisabled and disabled readers solved anagrams from semantic, phonemic, and unrelated word lists. The anagrams varied in terms of low and high cognitive effort (defined as the reorganization task demand on a limited memory capacity). It was found in Experiment 1 that high effort led to better recall than low effort for nondisabled readers, while the disabled were superior to the nondisabled reader in the recall of low-effort words. Experiment 2 replicated this finding across developmental age and type of word lists. A third experiment clearly demonstrated that the disabled reader is less likely to recall words of high cognitive effort as compared with intermediate and low ones. Taken together, the findings support the hypothesis that nondisabled and disabled readers differ in processing capacity; they further suggest that cognitive effort may be a relevant factor in word encoding processes.