External and verbal strategies in children with and without mild mental retardation.

External memory strategies (e.g., moving objects) were investigated in 11- and 17-year-old children with mild mental retardation and 7-, 9-, 11- and 17-year-old children without mental retardation (N = 95). In an external memory task, after hearing from 1 to 7 sentences, subjects placed objects in specified spatial locations. In the verbal memory task, subjects recalled sentences orally. Target-oriented strategies increased with the number of sentences and were positively related to accuracy. There was no difference between children with mental retardation and their age peers in object-oriented strategies. For all groups, external strategies were used more frequently than verbal strategies. These results show that children with mental retardation have more strategy competencies than reported in studies of covert verbally based strategies.