Responses to Requests for Conversational Repair by Adults With Mental Retardation

Abstract

This study focused on adjustments made in conversation in response to listener feedback. Subjects consisted of 22 community-based and 22 institutionalized adults with mental retardation individually matched for full-scale IQ. For each subject, data were collected in a dyadic conversation with an investigator. During the course of the conversation, the investigator introduced stacked sequences of three requests for clarification of the same message (“Huh?” “What?” “What?”). Each subject’s responses to these requests were analyzed. Results indicated that community-based subjects used certain sophisticated repair strategies more often than did their institutionalized peers. However, neither group of subjects was as responsive to the requests for clarification as would have been predicted considering their general levels of intellectual and linguistic functioning.