aeh, if I may butt in here for a moment, can you comment on the significance of the reverse profile, when a child is relatively good at the understanding directions test but struggles with listening comprehension? Does that get you thinking about any disorder in particular?
I'll take a dice roll at that. Based on reading various stuff the Eides have done (Dyslexic Advantage, +) and articles linked from their site.. The extreme listening comprehension maps to the heightened semantic ability associated with dyslexia along with that "seeing the forest" sort of mind. The opposite would be the tree and detail orientation which ranges into the autism spectrum.
Mm-hm. Not an unreasonable scenario. Also, individuals with very strong working memory, but not necessarily the language-related ability to go with it, could very well perform like this. Some of them might fall on the spectrum, others may not. There are also visual supports, of a sort, provided for the WJIII Understanding Directions task. The task consists of a series of familiar-looking scenes with various details. The directions are something like, "If there are two trees in the picture, touch the balloon and the table, but first, touch the cat." A person with a good memory can use the visuals in the picture to help tag the steps of the directions. A person with an excellent auditory memory can just memorize them by rote and think about them afterward. There is no particular verbal logic to the directions, so they are not all that amenable to support with high verbal intelligence.
WIAT-III Listening Comprehension, OTOH, is designed to resemble naturalistic listening tasks. It consists of brief to moderate-length listening passages designed to resemble excerpts of conversations, advertising, or lectures (like a snippet of a Discovery Channel show). While it relies quite a bit on auditory working memory, as well, it is all meaningful, and consists, on the whole, of long enough passages that you can use contextual understanding. Some of the items also specifically require you to interpret the passages, rather than simply retain and reproduce details.
