Eighteen moderately and mildly retarded children were administered pre- and posttests of morphological usage consisting of 54 lexical items and 27 nonsense items. Subjects received 6 weeks’ training (fifteen 15-minute training lessons) on one-half of the lexical items. Results indicate that moderately and mildly retarded children made equal gains, suggesting that both groups are able to generalize from language training to application in different and novel linguistic forms. No evidence was found for the contention that more severely retarded children acquire language through strategies that differ qualitatively from strategies employed by their brighter peers.
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