Original Research
The communicative abilities of mild mental retardates
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
Submitted: 14 November 1980 | Published: 14 November 1980
About the author(s)
Ruth Bluestone, Department of Speech Therapy, Johannesburg Hospital, Johannesburg, South AfricaFull Text:
PDF (266KB)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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