Effect of incentives and age on the visual recognition of retarded readers

Abstract

A tachistoscopic form recognition task was administered to 24 retarded readers (experimentals) and 24 normal readers (controls). Each of these groups was subdivided into younger and older age levels. There were two treatments, incentive and nonincentive, and half the Ss from each group were tested under each treatment. It was found that differences between groups and between ages were mainly a function of the relatively poor performance of the younger experimentals, which supports the developmental lag hypothesis. Incentives produced no discernible effect upon the performance of any of the groups. The data were also analyzed for latency of response, practice effects and reversal errors, none of which was related to reading retardation.