Assessing social cognition in young mentally retarded and nonretarded children.

The social-cognitive skills of 38 young retarded children ages 24 to 92 months were assessed on a set of communication tasks. Analyses examined (a) the relationship of social age and social communication, (b) whether performance levels indicate that the tasks conform to an ordinal sequence, and (c) the extent to which such a sequence would resemble that determined by performance of a nonretarded reference population. Tasks were also administered to 61 nonretarded children to replicate and extend the comparative data base of earlier findings. Each child was administered 23 nonverbal social communication tasks that assessed the skill domains of percept production (showing), percept deprivation (hiding), and percept diagnosis (gesturing). Results indicated that the social-cognitive skills of both retarded and nonretarded children were related to social age. Guttman scalogram analyses revealed that although the patterns were not identical for the two populations, communicative performance conformed to developmental patterns characterized by hierarchical sequences from simple to more complex forms. The findings are consistent with developmental theory and have diagnostic and therapeutic implications for young retarded children.