Concept Learning in Culturally Disadvantaged Children as a Function of Verbal Pretraining

Abstract

While research indicates that verbal pretraining has a positive influence on the discrimination learning performance of subjects of normal intelligence, a comparable influence has not been shown for other types of conceptual tasks for retarded subjects. The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the effects of stimulus pretraining on concept learning by subjects who had a “high risk” of being classified as mentally retarded at some future time. A group of 27 “higher risk” and 21 “lower risk” subjects was randomly divided into three pretraining groups: verbal label, attention, and control. Subsequent to pretraining on the stimuli used for Transfer Task 1, subjects in each group were presented with a concept learning task (Transfer Task 1). After reaching the criterion of learning on Transfer Task 1, subjects were presented with a second, new, concept learning task. Analysis of the data revealed that there were no significant performance differences between risk groups and that pretraining had a significantly positive effect on performance.