Prenatal alcohol exposure is associated with widespread
and devastating neurodevelopmental deficits. Numerous reports
have suggested memory deficits in both humans and animals
exposed prenatally to alcohol. However, the nature of these
memory deficits remains to be characterized. Recently children
with fetal alcohol syndrome were shown to have learning
and memory deficits on a verbal learning and memory measure
that involved free recall and recognition memory. The current
study seeks to further characterize memory functioning
in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure by evaluating
priming performance. The choice of task is also relevant
given previous studies of memory performance in patient
groups with and without involvement of the basal ganglia,
a group of structures known to be affected in fetal alcohol
syndrome. Three groups were evaluated for lexical priming,
free recall, recognition memory, and verbal fluency: (1)
children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure; (2) children
with Down syndrome; and (3) nonexposed controls. The children
with Down syndrome showed significantly less priming than
alcohol-exposed children, who did not differ from controls.
In addition, the alcohol-exposed children were impaired
on the free recall task but not on the recognition memory
task, whereas the children with Down syndrome performed
significantly worse than the alcohol-exposed group on both
tasks. Finally, on the verbal fluency task, children with
heavy prenatal alcohol exposure were impaired on both category
and letter fluency, but the degree of impairment was greater
for letter fluency. These results further characterize
the memory deficits in children with heavy prenatal alcohol
exposure suggesting that in spite of learning and memory
deficits, they are able to benefit from priming of verbal
information. (JINS, 1999, 5, 462–471.)
Comparison of Verbal Learning and Memory in Children With Heavy Prenatal Alcohol Exposure or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder