Effects of receptive and expressive training of category labels on generalized learning by severely mentally retarded...

The effects of receptive vs. expressive training of category labels on the acquisition of generalized referential labels by prelinguistic severely mentally retarded children were investigated. A crossover design was used, in which each subject received the two conditions successively; order of presentation of conditions was counterbalanced across subjects. The data indicated that receptive training resulted in more accurate generalization to novel category members than did expressive training. Further, generalization was above chance levels following receptive training but not following expressive training. The importance of these results for designing and evaluating generalized labeling instruction for severely retarded children was considered.