The Mentally Handicapped

Abstract

Two recent books contain chapters summarizing current knowledge in this area. Baker (5) devoted a chapter to the slow-learning child and another to the mentally subnormal. Concepts of feeble-mindedness were presented by Stoddard (38). Wallin (44) reported on Atypical children: Mental Defectives in a recent encyclopedia. The social, mental, developmental, educational, constitutional, and etiological criteria of mental deficiency and implications of different concepts of this phenomenon were discussed by Doll (8). Lurie and others (22) compared the IQ's of 140 problem children with their social quotients as determined by the Vineland Social Maturity scale. They found that in general the SQ was appreciably lower than the IQ but that children of low IQ tended to compensate by developing a social maturation beyond their intellectual level. Valentiner (42) compared the fatigability of two groups aged ten to thirteen, with mean IQ of 65 and of 100. The mentally deficient were somewhat inferior in hand grip but not markedly more susceptible to muscular fatigue. In mental work such as color-naming and cancellation the mentally deficient performed at a lower level, with less accuracy, and fatigued more quickly. After following the speech patterns of ten low-grade feeble-minded children, Irwin (18) reached the conclusion that their developmental status in this area at four years of age approximates that of the normal child at less than one year.