Disorders of communication: investigating the development of language of mentally retarded children.

Research conducted at the Waisman Center on Mental Retardation and Human Development over the past 10 years documents the multidimensional nature of the development of children's language in retarded and nonretarded populations. Recent advances in research methodology now available for investigating language comprehension and production will allow large-scale indepth studies of the lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic aspects of the language performance of a variety of retarded populations.