title: Effects of different stimulus manipulations of the acquisition of word recognition in trainable mentally retarded children.
abstract: The present study was designed to assess the efficacy of different procedures for establishing transfer of stimulus control from pictorial representations to printed words in trainable mentally retarded school children. The study consisted of two experiments. In experiment 1, four training conditions were used, i.e. two conditions (stimulus shaping and stimulus connected prompt fading) in which the subjects' attention was guided to the training stimuli, and two conditions (stimulus disconnected prompt fading and no fading) in which the subjects were allowed to respond only to the prompts. The results showed that stimulus shaping and stimulus connected prompt fading were far more effective than either one of the other procedures. Subsequent analyses revealed that 1 the stimulus control of the trained words was restricted to one or two letters, and 2 in case it was restricted to one letter, this was frequently a letter other than the one used for training. Furthermore, it was noted that the learned discriminations deteriorated as time or training progressed. Experiment 2 was designed to replicate some of the findings of experiment 1, and to control for one of the variables contributing to the superior efficiency of stimulus shaping over stimulus connected prompt fading. In general, the results of this experiment confirmed those obtained in experiment 1.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception