| One deterrent to adaptive functioning in individuals with mental retardation involves deficits in communication skills, such as referential communication. Two experiments were conducted in order to compare referential communication skills of mentally retarded and nonretarded children and adolescents, and determine if training found to be effective with young, nonretarded children would improve these skills for mentally retarded individuals.;The purpose of Experiment 1 was to compare referential communication skills of mentally retarded and nonretarded children and adolescents. Sixty-nine nonretarded children were matched with 69 mentally retarded subjects on the Quick Test, which measures vocabulary development. These pairs were divided into three groups differing in mental age (MA): mean MAs 5, 8, and 11 years. Each subject received 36 trials in a referential communication task. On each trial, subjects were asked to describe one designated referent picture so that it could be distinguished from one or two other pictures. On 12 trials, two dissimilar pictures were presented. Twelve trials depicted two similar pictures where comparison activity was necessary for adequate performance, and on the remaining 12 trials, three similar pictures were displayed, requiring more sophisticated comparison activity.;All subjects produced informative messages on trials requiring no comparison activity. On trials where comparison activity was required, performance of the 5-year MA group was inferior to that of the 8-year MA group, which in turn was inferior to that of the 11-year MA group. Nonretarded subjects significantly outperformed mentally retarded subjects on trials requiring comparison activity for adequate performance.;The purpose of Experiment 2 was to determine if training found to be effective with young, nonretarded children would improve the referential skills of mentally retarded children and adolescents. Half of the mentally retarded participants who had not consistently produced informative messages in Experiment 1 were given perceptual feedback training, whereas the other half served as controls. Perceptual feedback training involved providing explicit instructions as to why messages were informative or uninformative. One week after the 24 training trials, they received 16 posttest trials with materials used in training and 16 transfer trials with novel materials. Perceptual feedback training significantly improved communicative competence of the mentally retarded subjects during training, as well as on posttest and transfer tasks.;The results of these experiments demonstrate that mentally retarded children and adolescents lag behind MA-matched nonretarded children in referential communication skills. They can learn rules of communication, however, and by doing so, enhance their communicative competence. |
