Sensorimotor functioning and prelinguistic communication of severely and profoundly retarded individuals

The prelinguistic, nonverbal communicative behavior of 40 institutionalized severely and profoundly retarded children and adolescents functioning at various stages of Piaget's sensorimotor period was examined. Five scales of the Uzgiris and Hunt (1975) sensorimotor assessment were used to determine general level of sensorimotor functioning. A standard set of communication elicitation tasks was employed to examine the gestures used to communicate in both imperative and declarative contexts. More competent sensorimotor performance was associated with higher frequency of more sophisticated and symbolic forms of gestural communication, and subjects generally used more complex gestures to communicate in the imperative than in the declarative tasks. Applicability of the results to the design of future language-intervention programs and their implications for general theory concerning the relations between language and cognition and between normal and atypical development were discussed.