The purpose of this study was to investigate the development and use of certain grammatical morphemes, i.e., the English inflections for plural, possessive, present progressive and past tense in the speech of educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents. The performance on two grammatical tasks of EMR subjects was compared to that of normal control subjects matched by mental age scores. The first task was to produce, verbally, the required inflection for a novel (nonsense) word on a modified version of Berko’s Test of English Morphology (BTEM) (Berko, 1958). Secondly, subjects responded to grammatical contrasts in lexical or real words at levels of imitation, comprehension and production on a modified form of the Imitation, Comprehension and Production Test (ICP) (Fraser, Bellugi and Brown, 1963).
The results of this study revealed statistically significant poorer performance in the use of English inflections by EMR adolescents when compared with control subjects of similar mental age, specifically in the use of less common allomorphs for plural, possessive and past tense.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-3260 |
| Date | 01 January 1975 |
| Creators | Richard, Nancy Barton |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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