Language comprehension processes of mentally retarded children.

The strategies for sentence comprehension employed by a group of 18 severely retarded children were compared with those of a group of nonretarded children matched on MA. Using toys, the children acted out a series of simple active- and passive-voice sentences describing events that were either probable, improbable, or neutral with respect to semantic expectations. The retarded children tended to rely more on semantic expectations than did the nonretarded children. Retarded children whose MAs were less than 3 years did not take word order into account, but those of higher MA did use a word-order strategy. They assumed that the first noun in the sentence corresponded to the actor in the external situation.