title: Differences between mentally retarded and nonretarded persons' efficiency of auditory sentence processing.
abstract: Mentally retarded adolescents and MA-matched nonretarded children participated in three experiments designed to examine differences in language-processing efficiency. A compressed speech technique was used in Experiments 1 and 2. Experiment 3 relied on a sentence-picture verification procedure. Our results suggest that retarded and nonretarded individuals differ in the speed with which they are able to execute the semantic-analytic processes but not necessarily the phonological encoding processes that are involved in auditory language comprehension. In addition, the data suggest a possible group difference in the quality of the semantic representation encoded during sentence processing.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception