Language performance of educable mentally retarded and normal children at five age levels.

The present study comprised an analysis and comparison of the language performance of educable mentally retarded and normal children at mental age levels six through 10 years. Both syntactic and functional performance variables were investigated. The results indicate language performance differences between the two groups with the primary discriminators being hesitation phenomena (false starts, filled pauses, and repeats) and clausal constructions (relative and subordinate clauses), resulting in a higher sentence elaboration level for normal children.