Abstract: This paper deals with a comparative study of the neuropsycholo-gical characteristics between two groups of primary school studentsaged 9 to 14 years, the difficulty group (DG) consists of fifty pu-pils with lower achievement, the control group(CG) consists of fif-ty peers with higher achievement. Each of them was examined bythe Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Test Battery for MiddleChildren-Revised in China (HRB(m)-RC), the Wechsler MemoryScale-Revised in China(WMS-RC), the Wechsler Intelligence Scalefor Children-Chinese Revision (WISC-CR), and the Sorting Testmeasured abstract thinking and conceptual formation. The performa-nces of the two groups were compared on thirty-six subtests. Theresults were presented as follows: (1) the performances of all testsin DG were inferior to those in CG, (2) the subtest scores relatedto verbal comprehesion, problem solving-reasoning, and long-termmemory in DG children were obviously lower than those in CGchildren, (3) DG children had dull intelligence,with PIQ higher thanVIQ, (4) Pearson's product moment correlation analysis showed asignificant positive correlation between neuropsychological perfor-mances and academic achievement. The neuropsychological charact-eristics of DG children and relationship between pupils' learningabilities and test scores were discussed.

Key words: learning difficulties, neuropsychology, intelligence, memory, child