Treating Verbal Working Memory in Children with Intellectual Disability or Borderline Intellectual Functioning

In this multiple case study we involved four participants with intellectual disability (mean age 12.5) and four cases with borderline intellectual functioning (mean age 12.6) in a WM training and contrasted the effects of either (i) a baseline treatment; (ii) a control training stimulating visuo-spatial and narrative skills; (iii) an experimental treatment with tasks involving an interplay between active attentional control, memory encoding and verbal recalling. Baseline, control, and experimental treatments consisted of two weekly two-hour sessions occurring in units lasting 8-10 weeks each of whom was preceded and followed by testing. We analyzed the children’s pre- and post-training performance with the listening span test (Pazzaglia, Palladino & De Beni, 2000) and used chronological age norms to identify as “clinically significant progress” (CSP) a pre- post-test improvement of at least 1 standardized score in the number of words that were correctly recalled in sequence. The child involved in the within-subject design of study 1 made no progress after baseline but had a CSP after the experimental training. In study 2, in which three pairs of children matched for IQ and socio-cultural background had been involved in either control or experimental treatment, we found a CSP in each of the three children participating at experimental training, but only in one child participating at control training. The child in study 3 made progress neither after control training nor after an experimental treatment that was deprived of complex verbal dual tasks. We provided preliminary evidence that training with complex verbal dual tasks has a “near transfer” effect to WM in children with ID or borderline intellectual functioning.