Communication in retarded adolescents: utilization of known language skills.

Six retarded adolescents were pretested for comprehension and production of items on a sentence comprehension test and then given a referential communication task using these items as stimulus material. Each child acted as speaker and listener with each of the other five children. The presentation of items was arranged so that the target sentence differed from others of the set equally often in subject, verb, or object. Results showed that the critical feature was less likely to be communicated successfully when it was the verb. Some adolescents were less successful than others in this task but improved with further trials.