Language Comprehension in the Moderately Retarded Child

Abstract

The Carrow Auditory Test of Language Comprehension was administered to retarded trainable pupils attending public school special education classes (a) to evaluate the appropriateness of the Carrow test for use with trainable retarded children and (b) to compare the development of linguistic comprehension of children with normal IQ's with that of trainable retarded children. The results suggest that the Carrow test can provide useful information concerning the language comprehension development of trainable retarded children. Results further demonstrate systematic language growth in children with IQ's as low as 20 and 30. These children acquired mastery of vocabulary items and aspects of morphology and syntax. When matched on mental age, the retarded children's use of lexical items did not differ from nonretarded children's to a great extent; however, retarded children's use of grammatical categories was inferior to that of nonretarded children.