Original Research

The communicative abilities of mild mental retardates

Ruth Bluestone
South African Journal of Communication Disorders | Vol 27, No 1 | a364 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajcd.v27i1.364 | © 1980 Ruth Bluestone | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 14 November 1980 | Published: 14 November 1980

About the author(s)

Ruth Bluestone, Department of Speech Therapy, Johannesburg Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa

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Abstract

The interpersonal communicative abilities of five mild mental retardates are investigated and described. One test of  interpersonal communication was chosen from the literature. In the test situation, the experimenter taught each subject/speaker how to play a simple board game. Each speaker then taught the game to a listener of  similar mental age. The channels of  communication, both verbal and nonverbal, used by the speakers to explain the game items, were determined. The speakers' speech style (productivity, vocabulary and utterance structure) was evaluated qualitatively. Results indicated that all the speakers used both verbal and nonverbal communication behaviours to explain the rules of  the game. Unlike the experimenter, the speakers utilized nonverbal behaviours (pointing and manipulation of  the game material) as a distinct mode of  communication. The speakers used an egocentric speech style and they all, unlike the experimenter, used speech to help the listener play the game correctly. The communicative ability of  the speakers was not found  to be commensurate with their mental ages and it was postulated that their inferior  cognitive abilites predisposed them to use both primitive nonverbal behaviours and an egocentric speech style.

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