Degree of associative relatedness and sentence processing by adolescents with and without mental retardation

Previous research has suggested that individuals with mental retardation are less likely than individuals without mental retardation to access and incorporate information about the relations between words of sentences in the representations of those sentences in memory (e.g., Merrill & Bilsky, 1990; Merrill & Jackson, in press). A cued recall study and a semantic verification study were conducted to determine whether the magnitude of this group difference could be made smaller by increasing the degree to which the words in the sentences were semantically related. In both experiments, individuals with mental retardation exhibited an ability to utilize contextual information to a greater extent when the words were related. In the highly related conditions, the differences between groups was virtually eliminated.