The study involving 60 learning disabled (LD) children (7-10 years old) was designed to determine if LD children go beyond the given information when trying to understand and remember sentences, i.e., do they spontaneously construct inferential relationships like adults and other children, or do they attend to and rehearse individual sentences of specific sentence constituents. In addition to assessing memory strategies, two types of sentences (highly imageable versus not easily imaged) were presented to determine whether or not semantic integration by these children was related to, or facilitated by, image factors. Further, developmental changes in the use of integrative skills were analyzed. The mode of storage, or the performance of integration, was measured by testing the children's abilities to recognize sentences which were never actually presented, but could be derived through a comprehension of relationships among semantically related sentences. Results indicated that normal children spontaneously integrate the information expressed by a number of nonconsecutively presented, but semantically related, sentences; LD children do not. LD children appeared to attend to smaller units, short sentences, as well as words. (SBH)