ABSTRACT
The ability of adolescents with mental retardation to reason about other people's mental states was examined. Subjects were asked questions about the knowledge and beliefs of characters in stories that they heard and saw enacted with props. The adolescents with mental retardation performed worse than did children without mental retardation matched for MA. The adolescents with mental retardation did better on questions requiring first-order reasoning than on those involving second-order reasoning; this pattern is similar to that found previously for children without mental retardation.
Subject(s)
Concept Formation , Intellectual Disability/psychology , Interpersonal Relations , Personality Development , Social Perception , Adolescent , Adult , Child , Female , Humans , Intelligence , Male , Personality Assessment , Projective TechniquesABSTRACT
We examined the ability of 14 persons with mental retardation and of 14 children without mental retardation to adjust the linguistic form of their directives as a function of their listener's affective state (happy or sad) and activity level (busy or idle). Directives were elicited by requiring the subjects to obtain toys from an adult listener. We found that both groups of subjects were sensitive to these dimensions of the communicative context. However, the directive forms used by the subjects with mental retardation were more imposing overall.
Subject(s)
Communication , Intellectual Disability , Adolescent , Adult , Child , Female , Humans , Interpersonal Relations , Male , Semantics , Speech Perception , Speech Production Measurement , Verbal BehaviorABSTRACT
This study had two purposes. The first was to examine age differences in the extent to which children infer and use a speaker's interpersonal goal to understand speech acts. To this end, the subjects responded to Do you have...? requests in a role-playing task. The goal behind such a request is implicit in the speaker's choice of noun phrase. We sought to determine whether children, like adults, use the noun phrase to infer the speaker's goal and thereby decide whether the request is a yes-no question or a directive. The second purpose was to examine age differences in the extent to which children select responses that carry implications appropriate to the speaker's interpersonal goal. To do this, Do you have...? requests containing general category labels were addressed to the children when they possessed all the category exemplars and when they possessed only a few exemplars. A simple yes implies that the listener has nearly all exemplars and, therefore, is inappropriate for the speaker's goal in the latter situation. The subjects were six-, seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-olds and adults, with 12 subjects per age. Only the eleven-year-olds and the adults used the speaker's noun phrase and considered the implications of yes.
Subject(s)
Concept Formation , Interpersonal Relations , Language Development , Speech Perception , Verbal Behavior , Adult , Child , Child, Preschool , Female , Humans , Male , Psycholinguistics , VocabularyABSTRACT
We examined the correlations between receptive language level and performance on indices of nonverbal cognitive functioning for 20 persons with mental retardation and for 20 children without mental retardation matched to them on nonverbal MA. The correlations suggested that the retarded group focused on the formal, sequential properties of language. The correlations also suggested that the nondisabled group placed less emphasis on the formal, sequential properties of language and more on semantic, conceptual properties. These differences in approach may explain why the persons with mental retardation did poorly on the task of understanding spoken language compared to the children without mental retardation.
