To compare social versus mechanical presentation of stimulus material under prompted or trial-and-error (confirmation) conditions of learning, institutionalized educable and trainable mentally handicapped children were tested on a discrimination learning task. Results were felt to indicate that social reinforcement may not be as motivating for…

Reviewed was a 4 year project in which factors influencing learning in the mentally retarded were investigated by means of comparative studies on guided or prompted learning (P) and confirmation or trial and error learning (C). Previous research on P and C was summarized briefly. Examined were seven paradigmatic studies from the project which…

A study of the free speech pronoun usage of 15 normal and 15 language-delayed children (2-5 years old) showed that it is possible to distinguish between children at five different levels of language development by considering linguistically relevant pronoun properties. (Author)

A paradigm wherein a mother was reinforced for observing and modeling her child's therapist produced significant changes in a maladaptive parent-child interaction pattern. (Author)

Lexical development in mentally retarded and normal children was indexed using the Free Word Association Task. Approximately 170 institutionalized and noninstitutionalized retarded children and 59 normal children were administered the 40-word stimulus list consisting mainly of adjectives and nouns. Responses were categorized according to apparent…

Twenty graduate students and 20 mothers randomly chosen from a university community were asked to rate retarded and nonretarded children (1-5 years old) on characteristics reflecting social competence and interpersonal attractiveness and also on a social distance scale. (Author)

The effects of interspersed trials on prompted (P) and confirmation (C) paired associate learning were studied in 64 institutionalized educable mental retardates. Subjects were instructed to learn eight pairs of pictures which were presented by a slide projector. There were four groups in both the P and C condition. The treatment for these groups…

Twenty high mental age (MA) subjects and 33 low MA subjects who had been in a free word association test 30 months previously were retested with the Moran 80-Word List. At the time of the previous testing, subjects in the high group had a mean chronological age (CA) of 17.1 and mean MA of 11.5; subjects in the low group had a mean CA of 15.3 and…

Using 48 educable mentally handicapped students (ages 12-18) as subjects, a study investigated the effect of prompted and trial-and-error procedures on the learning of a paired-associate task, when items (concrete nouns of less than six letters) in one list were drawn from the same categories (animals, food) and in a second list, from different…

In a study on short term memory, 32 educable mentally retarded subjects (mean IQ 62.68, mean mental age 103.78 months) were randomly assigned to each of the four experimental conditions. An automated machine presented the stimuli (32 three-letter words) and the interference items (a list of random numbers read aloud between stimuli presentations).…

The effects of prompting and confirmation on automated presentation of materials in discrimination learning were studied. Eight pairs of words or pictures were presented to 48 mentally retarded subjects (mean IQ 63, mean chronological age 163.4 months, mean mental age 103.3 months). Each subject's correct responses advanced the program and, in the…