Processing Narratives for Verbatim and Gist Information by Adults with Language Learning Disabilities: A Functional Neuroimaging Study

How verbal information is processed and recalled appears to be influenced by the structure of the information presented (e.g., unrelated sentences vs. narratives) and the processes the listener uses to encode the information (e.g., verbatim encoding vs. gist extraction). Twenty adults, half with a history of learning disabilities (HLD) and half without (control group) received functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Participants were instructed to listen to narrative passages for either the exact wording or the general meaning of the narratives and respond to questions about the narratives. These conditions were contrasted with listening to randomly arranged sentences. Adults in the HLD group responded to test questions less accurately than the control group. Likewise, the HLD group showed physiological differences during both narrative and sentence processing in comparison to the control group. Both groups showed differences in processing narratives for gist versus verbatim information, which involved activation centered over the right precentral sulcus. The results support the notion that distinct aspects of verbal processing draw differentially on a distributed physiological network and that adults selected for HLD show both behavioral and physiological differences on narrative processing tasks. However, these differences are not necessarily qualitative in nature.