Abstract
Children with ADHD have difficulty understanding causal connections and goal plans within stories. This study examined mediators of group differences in story narrations between children ages 7–9 with and without ADHD, including as potential mediators both the core deficits of ADHD (i.e., inattention, disinhibition, planning/working memory) as well measures of phonological processing and verbal skills. Forty-nine children with ADHD and 67 non-referred children narrated a wordless book and completed tasks assessing the core deficits of ADHD, phonological processing, and verbal skills. Results revealed that, although no shorter than those of non-referred children, the narratives of children with ADHD contained fewer elements relating to the story’s causal structure and goal plan. Deficits in sustained attention accounted for the most variance in these differences. Results have implications for understanding and ameliorating the academic problems experienced by children with ADHD.
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Notes
We chose to utilize a narrow conceptualization of EF in our study, because a broad view of this core deficit would include aspects of inattention and disinhibition. Such a broad conceptualization would overlap with the other core deficits under investigation and make interpretation of results more difficult.
Significant group differences in failing to inhibit responses were noted only for the two stop signals presented closest to the go stimuli, with the children with ADHD making more inhibitory errors. The difficulty all children experienced in inhibiting responses to the three stop signals furthest from the go stimuli appeared to preclude significant group differences on these measures, although there was a trend for the children with ADHD to make more inhibitory errors. Thus, we chose to include only the first two stop signals in the disinhibition composite.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by grant #MH47386 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Mark Fillmore and Kristen Berthiaume in the completion of this study.
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Flory, K., Milich, R., Lorch, E.P. et al. Online Story Comprehension among Children with ADHD: Which Core Deficits are Involved?. J Abnorm Child Psychol 34, 850–862 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-006-9070-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-006-9070-7