LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION PROCESSES OF MENTALLY-RETARDED CHILDREN

Abstract

The strategies for sentence comprehension employed by 18 severely retarded children were compared with those of nonretarded children matched on MA [mental age]. Using toys, the children acted out a series of simple active- and passive-voice sentences describing events that were either probable, improbable or neutral with respect to semantic expectations. The retarded children tended to rely more on semantic expectations than did the nonretarded children. Retarded children whose MA were less than 3 yr did not take word order into account, but those of higher MA did use a word-order strategy. They assumed that the 1st noun in the sentence corresponded to the actor in the external situation.