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Language behavior by mildly handicapped and nonretarded children on complement clauses.

D Natsopoulos1, A Xeromeritou

  • 1Psychological Laboratory, University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Research in Developmental Disabilities
|January 1, 1990
PubMed
Summary

Mildly handicapped (MH) children comprehend complement clauses similarly to nonretarded (NR) children, but lack metalinguistic skills. Verbal mental age and Digit Span do not predict MH children's linguistic performance.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Child Language Acquisition

Background:

  • Complement clauses are complex linguistic structures crucial for language development.
  • Understanding how children with and without intellectual disabilities process these structures offers insights into cognitive and linguistic development.
  • Previous research has explored various principles governing clause comprehension, but findings across different populations remain debated.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the comprehension of complement clauses in Greek by mildly handicapped (MH) and nonretarded (NR) children.
  • To compare the syntactic and semantic processing strategies used by MH and NR children.
  • To examine the predictive power of verbal mental age, Digit Span, and verbal IQ on complement clause comprehension in both groups.

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Main Methods:

  • The study involved 2 groups of children: mildly handicapped (MH) and nonretarded (NR).
  • Participants were assessed on their comprehension of complement clauses embedded in four matrix verbs in Greek.
  • Cognitive measures including verbal mental age, Digit Span, and verbal IQ were administered.

Main Results:

  • MH children demonstrated similar use of syntactic information as NR children in complement clause comprehension.
  • Verbal mental age was not the best predictor of linguistic performance for either group.
  • Digit Span and verbal IQ correlated significantly with comprehension in NR children but not in MH children.
  • The minimal distance principle (MDP) was found to be debatable, while the semantic role principle (SRP) received partial support.
  • MH children exhibited a deficit in metalinguistic ability compared to younger NR children.

Conclusions:

  • MH children’s comprehension of complement clauses relies on similar syntactic cues as NR children, suggesting preserved syntactic processing.
  • Cognitive factors like verbal mental age and Digit Span have differential predictive power for language comprehension in MH versus NR children.
  • The findings suggest that metalinguistic awareness may be a key area of difficulty for MH children, impacting their overall language processing abilities.