A Experimental Research Of Semantic Processing Of Mentally Retarded Children

The author holds that semantic processing, which play an important role is an important issue in the research field of cognition. The significance of a study of the semantic processing on Chinese-speaking MR (mental retarded) children lies in two aspects. First, we can understand the basic patten of semantic processing and lay a good foundation for the cognitive study on special children. Second, we can find and analyze the difference between MR children and NR (non-retarded) children, advance some experimental evidence-for the choice of educational placement and teaching methodology on MR children. The aim of this research is to explore the characteristics and the rules in the Chinese semantic processing of MR children, and the relationship between MR and NR children. For this purpose, the author conducted a set of experiments to explore the MR children's semantic processing by studying their semantic processing in words and sentences.In the first part of this dissertation, the author introduces the research methods of semantic processing of words and sentences, gives a literature review on the research of MRchildren's semantic processing, and illustrates the significance, contents and methodology of this research.In the second part, six experiments of semantic processing were conducted on MR children and MA-matched controls to compare the difference among subjects with different levels of intellgence.Experiments 1, 2 and 3 were conducted to study the difference of semantic processing between MR children and MA-matched NR children by word association, IAT and category judgement respectively. The three experiments were carried out to analyse semantic storage from different perspectives. The results suggest: The structure of semantic storage of mild MR children is similar to that of MA-matched NR children; the mental lexicon structure of mild MR children is more loose than that of the NR subjects, and contains some errors; which affects the intensity of the connection between words, and increase the degree of difficulty in following semantic extraction; Moderatlly MR children can also establish their own mental lexicon which is similer to that of CA-matched mild MR children in the form of storage, but the structure is more loose, and it has a great number of errors; The semantic extraction is of low speed and accuracy on MR children.Experiments 4, 5 and 6 were conducted to study the sentence semantic processing of MR children, three experiments were concentrated on the awereness abilities of sentence semantic structure, the competence of sentence semanticprocessing with different syntax, and the abilities of logical semantic judgement on the complex sentences. The results showed that the awereness abilities of sentence semantic structure differed obviously between mild MR children and MA-matched NR children. There is the same semantic judgement order for different syntax between two groups, but the judgement abilities has great difference; The abilities to analyse the logical semantic relation between conjunctions and the sub-statement differed greatly in two groups. MR subjects were inclined to make judgement on the basis of sub-statement simply.In the third part of this dissertation, the author made a synthetical analysis and comes to the conclusion:The structure of semantic storage of MR children is similar to that of NR children, but the quantity of storage is less than that of NR groups; MR children are apt to be interfered by related information and are affected in the speed and accuracy of semantic extraction; The awereness abilities of sentence semantic structure of MR children were inferior than that of MA-matched controls, especially for those recessivly semantic selected restriction; The abilities to analyse the logical semantic relations between conjunctive words and the sub-statement differed greatly between two groups. These conclusions are enlightening to the education for MR children, and have great inspiration in educational arrangement and language education for mild MR children. For...