Speech Pathology and Audiology Commons^™

The Development Of Four English Inflections In The Speech Of Educable Mentally Retarded Adolescents, Nancy Barton Richard

Dissertations and Theses

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). Secondly, subjects responded to grammatical contrasts in lexical or real words at levels of imitation, …