title: Establishing sound blending in moderately mentally retarded children: implications of verbal instruction and pictorial prompting.
abstract: The present study evaluated a program for establishing blending of consonants (C) and vowel-consonant (VC) syllables in moderately mentally retarded children. The study consisted of two experiments. Experiment 1 assessed whether the subjects' failure to blend was due to the task requirements per se, or to the inadequacy of the instructional terminology ("Say together"). Experiment 2 evaluated the implications of using pictorial prompts in the acquisition and generalization of C-VC blending. The data revealed that (a) adequate verbal instruction had a modest but significant effect on the subjects' blending performance (Experiment 1), and (b) training without pictorial prompts resulted in better blending of trained and untrained C-VC items than training with pictorial prompts (Experiment 2).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: F R
authors.initials: FR
authors.lastname: Hoogeveen
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Kouwenhoven
authors.forename: P M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Smeets
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001521:Behavior Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D002648:Child; D003463:Cues; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D012057:Reinforcement, Verbal; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning