Many students cannot meet academic demands on long-term memory. They have difficulty transferring facts or skills to permanent storage and filing them away systematically. Some suffer from an inability to retrieve stored learning effortlessly, a phenomenon known as delayed automatization. Children with limited access to stored material recall slowly and imprecisely, and may have reduced capacity to recognize patterns or associations they have previously encountered. Problems may occur at various levels of verbal processing and production.
Some children have difficulty interpreting and manipulating the sounds of language.
They often must use contextual cues to understand speech, and they commonly find it difficult to read, spell, or learn foreign languages. Many students are confused about syntax, word order, or grammatical forms. Inability to cope with abstract, symbolic, and technical language ultimately has disastrous effects on school achievement. These discrepancies are often confusing to adults, who may not suspect a disabling language deficit in a child who seems to communicate fluently in social settings. The everyday conversational skill of such students is in striking contrast to their lack of facility with more academic, literate English.