Syntactic Indices of Language Use of Mentally Retarded and Normal Children

Three groups of 11-year old children institutionalized and non-institutionalized retardates and normals, were compared in their language usage on responses to TAT cards. The distribution of their words into common and uncommon, and over the part of speech categories was analysed, as well as the complexity and diversity of their sentences, verb and noun phrases. Retarded children did not differ from normal children in their usage of common and uncommon words, nor in their use of part of speech categories. Also, their verb phrases and noun phrases were in many respects comparable to those used by normal children. The clearest differences were found in the measures of sentence complexity and diversity: institutionalized retardates received the lowest scores of the three groups on these measures (significantly lower than the scores of the normal children), the scores of the non-institutionalized retardates were intermediate and those of the normal children the highest. Additional comparisons of the patterns of scores with those received by younger children showed that the institutionalized retardates were most comparable to normal 5-year olds, particularly in their sentence usage, whereas the non-institutionalized retardates were most comparable to normal children of the same chronological age.