A sentence demonstration task was used to examine the information processing skills of 14 normal and 14 learning disabled college students. The effects of sentence meaningfulness (meaningful vs. nonsense), sentence length (two vs. four vs. six vs. eight items), and presentation mode (words vs. logographs) were evaluated. A Population Membership by Sentence Length interaction was detected and indicated that performance differences between the populations, favoring the normal Ss, emerged on long sentences. Effects of sentence type and presentation mode were similar in the two populations. Differences in short term memory processing were hypothesized to account for the population differences. (Author)