Representational matching skills of persons with severe retardation

Abstract

Correspondences between physical realities and symbols become internalized representations of the world for normally developing children. For persons with severe retardation and significant oral language impairments, however, the transition to representational cognition may be a difficult one. This paper describes the performance of eight subjects with severe retardation on identity and nonidentity matching tasks employing objects, photographs, and line drawings. The persons who demonstrated some functional language skills performed better than peers with nonfunctional language skills on both the identity and nonidentity conditions. As representational complexity increased, greater difficulty in matching the stimuli was seen for the nonfunctional language group with line drawings the most difficult to match.