Comprehension and recall of sentences by mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals

Abstract

A cued sentence-recall task was used to determine the extent to which 24 mildly mentally retarded adolescents and 24 equal-MA nonretarded children differed in their ability to recall sentences and to infer and utilize particular exemplars of general nouns as retrieval cues. We found that the sentence recall performance of the retarded adolescents was poor relative to that of the nonretarded children; however, both groups found general and particular cues to be equally effective retrieval aids for target sentences. Differential sentence reconstruction and editing strategies were suggested as possible sources of the obtained recall differences.