False recollection in children with reading comprehension difficulties

Theoretical and forensic implications of developmental studies of the DRM illusion

“…Thus, the latter children's recall was actually more accurate. Another feature of Weekes et al's (2007) research that has been echoed in subsequent experiments (e.g., Holliday & Weekes, 2006) is that these differences in false memory were specific to semantically related DRM lists. When phonological DRM lists were administered (Sommers & Lewis, 1999), no between-group differences in true or false recall were detected.…”

“…That approach was implemented by Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, and Holliday (2007), who administered DRM tasks to groups of children who performed at their age norm on tests that tap the ability to process semantic relations between words (e.g., tests of reading comprehension) versus more than 1 year below their age norm, but did not differ in IQ or tests of nonsemantic verbal abilities. Levels of true recall were the same in the two groups, but as predicted, false recall was much higher in children with normal semantic processing than in children with low semantic processing.…”

Dual processes of false recognition in kindergarten children and elementary school pupils

“…Apparently, the activation of critical items benefits from repeated list presentation even in kindergarten children, at least when age-specific DRM lists are used. The impact of presentation frequency corresponds with previous findings concerning the dependence of false memories from the activation of critical items in children (e.g., Del Prete et al, 2014;McGeown, Gray, Robinson, & Dewhurst, 2014;Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, & Holliday, 2008;Wimmer & Howe, 2009). We assume that this activation would not benefit from list repetition when lists do not match the semantic knowledge of young children because previous findings indicate that kindergarten children do not tend to spontaneously extract gist information from DRM lists (Brainerd et al, 2011).…”

Children with ADHD symptoms are less susceptible to gap-filling errors than typically developing children

“…This result is likely due to their less efficient semantic processing abilities. Furthermore, Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, and Holliday (2008) showed that this false-memory effect was reduced in children with a specific reading comprehension disability.…”