Verb usage by educable mentally retarded children.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the semantic and morphological nature of verb usage by educable mentally retarded (EMR) children. Three groups of children were studied in structured and non-structured situations in which the verb system was the core interest. There were 15 mentally retarded younger children (8.6-9.6 years), 19 mentally retarded older children (10.0-12.6 years) and a control group of 17 normal children (5.0-6.0 years). Results showed that EMR children use fewer conjugations than normal children of similar or lower mental age, and thus they can express fewer verb-case relations. In particularly EMR children show limited use of process-verb relations. It was further found that EMR children are restricted in the morphological processing of verbs in past and future tenses.