When given verbal tasks that involve a story rather than word list, children with FASD exhibit superior memory during both immediate and delayed recall compared to their performance on word list tasks. In one study, performance on story recall and word-list recall were compared in alcohol-exposed children (Pei, Rinaldi, Rasmussen, Massey, & Massey, 2008). In comparison to the word-list task, subjects recalled more information on the story task but also recounted more inaccurate information. However, intrusions were only penalized on the word-list task, which may have affected the scores on these tasks. Because no control group was used, it is unclear in this study whether memory for stories in prenatal alcohol exposure is impaired compared to typically developing peers. Other studies, however, have reported deficits in this domain in children with heavy levels of exposure relative to comparison children (Willoughby, et al., 2008). In light to moderate levels of exposure, prenatal alcohol exposure predicted poor memory for stories at 10 years of age (Richardson, Ryan, Willford, Day, & Goldschmidt, 2002) but not 14 years (Willford, et al., 2004) within the same cohort of children. These findings suggest that these abilities might improve with age, at least in less affected children.
