Primary purposes of the study were to determine if mentally retarded students, when compared to nonretarded students, exhibited a deficit in the early stages of rote verbal learning, and whether such an early stage deficit could be reduced by pretraining. (KW)

Twenty three-year-old Down's syndrome children were compared on their ability to respond to typical preschool learning tasks when given either augmented or repetitive verbal instruction. (Author)

The ability of 23 educable mentally retarded children (mean chronological age, 9 years) to transfer verbal elaboration techniques to a labeling task was tested following one, two, or no elaboration experiences. An additional 18 retardates were tested in two outside control conditions to identify the effects of reversal experience on acquisition…

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

Two studies investigated characteristics of verbal elaborations (length and number of relations provided by the syntactic construction) to determine what makes them effective mediators for young children. Study I treated the role of an elaboration's length in facilitating paired associate learning in 22 nursery school children. Data indicated that…

Twenty-four educable mentally retarded children (10 to 15 years old) were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions (repetition-control, verbal context, and imagery) to determine the effects of elaboration on paired associate (PA) learning. Data from performances on two lists supported the hypothesis that elaboration in the form of…

Assessed were the effects of verbal placeholding and full verbal rehearsal (verbalizing aloud the critical components and sequence) on the direction following behavior of 14 institutionalized retarded adolescents (mean IQ 48). A control group from the same institution participated in practice sessions without the verbal rehearsal stress. Pre- and…

The bibliography on learning in mentally handicapped persons is divided into the following topic categories: applied behavior change, classical conditioning, discrimination, generalization, motor learning, reinforcement, verbal learning, and miscellaneous. An author index is included. (KW)

The effects of two types of elaboration training (imagery and sentence generation) on the paired associate learning of 32 educable mentally retarded children (aged 9 to 13 years were compared over two levels of verbalization (none and overt). Each S was first tested on a warmup list, then trained to generate elaborations, and finally given two…

Educable mentally retarded students were taught a verbal mediation learning strategy to determine if their performance pattern would correspond to learning potential designations derived with nonverbal materials. In comparisons of regular and special class groups using a picture paired-associates learning task, special class high-scorers performed…

To obtain an a priori estimate of natural language mediators (NLM's) 320 pairs of words with the consonant-vowel-consonant-pattern (CVC's) were broken into four series of 90 pairs and presented to 240 male and female undergraduates. Pairs were shown for 15 seconds while the subjects wrote down any associative device or NLM they could generate that…

Two introductory passages, one regular passage, and one experimental advance organizer passage developed to facilitate initial learning were assigned to normal and retarded children. The subjects were 184 normal 8-year-olds (controls' mean IQ 118.00, organizers' 118.80) and 184 educable mentally retarded 15-year-olds (EMR controls' mean IQ 74.85,…

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).…

Eight experiments studied the following aspects of associative strategies in learning: classification; verbalization at three developmental levels; verbalization by normal and educable children; facilitation of associative learning among educable retardates; effectiveness of familiarization and differentiation training on the successful employment…