Identifying the referents of spoken messages: use of context and clarification requests by children with and without mental retardation.

The ability of children with mental retardation and of children without mental retardation matched to them on nonverbal MA to use (a) contextual information and (b) clarification requests to resolve referential ambiguity was evaluated. Each child pretended to be a storekeeper and responded to an adult customer's ambiguous requests. The context disambiguated the request in some cases, but not in others. Both groups of children selected the appropriate referent when the context was informative. Only the children without mental retardation appropriately requested clarification when the context was uninformative. Referential performance was not related to their receptive language level or nonverbal MAs.