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Query: UMLS:C0025362 (mental retardation)
 15,878 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The Supreme Court recently decided that the death penalty as it applies to persons with mental retardation is not a violation of constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment as long as juries consider the convicted person's disabilities during trial proceedings. Advocates for persons with mental retardation have argued that because their disability reduces culpability in capital offenses, the death penalty is always inappropriate. In this paper we argued that the latter position makes unwarranted categorical assumptions about mental retardation, fails to consider the individualized and situation-specific determinants of culpability for a capital offense, and undermines the very assumptions required to restore respect and value for citizens with mental retardation as participants in society.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 May
PMID:Capital punishment and offenders with mental retardation: response to the Penry brief. 134 35

The correspondence between teachers' ratings of students' attention and measures of sustained and selective attention was examined. Subjects were 26 adolescents who were selected on the basis of ratings from among 100 students with educable mental retardation (EMR). The top 13 and the bottom 13 subjects in the ratings were designated as the good and the poor attenders. A 10-minute auditory vigilance test and an adapted version of Posner's physical and name identity task were given to the good and poor attenders. Results showed that whereas the vigilance task did not discriminate between the two groups, the Posner's task did. The former group was faster than the latter in both physical- and name-matching, suggesting that groups divided in attention ratings by teachers could be differentiated by increasing the strength of distractors.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 May
PMID:Measurement of attention deficit: correspondence between rating scales and tests of sustained and selective attention. 134 37

Fifteen preschool-age children with mild mental retardation (developmental delays) from mainstreamed schools were observed during two structured play sessions with matched peers without mental retardation. Children with developmental delays spent more time alone and when they played, showed less social play. The two groups did not differ on communication behaviors that maintained play or in negative affect; however, the children with developmental delays evidenced more disruptive entry, more regressive behaviors, and less positive affect. Families were interviewed concerning their attitudes about, and teaching of, social skills. For the children without mental retardation, level of social play was positively related to the family's teaching and the child's communication abilities. For the children with delays, social play related to developmental age and communication ability but not to family teaching.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 Jan
PMID:Social skills and their correlates: preschoolers with developmental delays. 137 Dec 15

Etiology-specific profiles of intellectual abilities were compared in three groups of males with mental retardation using the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC). Subjects included 10 males with fragile X syndrome, 10 with Down syndrome, and 10 with nonspecific mental retardation who were equated on both mental and chronological age. Across all three groups, sequential processing was lower than simultaneous processing or achievement, and particular subtests (e.g., Gestalt Closure) were relative strengths. Although boys with Down syndrome showed less extreme patterns of domain strengths and weaknesses, they showed a significant strength in the Sequential Processing Hand Movements subtest. In contrast, the Hand Movements subtest was lowest of all K-ABC subtests for males with fragile X syndrome. Implications were discussed for more fine-tuned research and intervention efforts.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 Jul
PMID:K-ABC profiles in children with fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and nonspecific mental retardation. 138 42

In referential communication, the speaker must communicate to the listener about how a referent is different from other stimuli (i.e., employ the "difference rule"--Whitehurst & Sonnenschein, 1985). In Experiment 1 we compared use of the difference rule by children with and without mental retardation matched for Quick Test MA. Participants with mental retardation were less likely to employ the difference rule. Experiment 2 demonstrated that perceptual feedback training, which teaches use of the difference rule, enhances referential communication of children with mental retardation.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 Sep
PMID:Development and training of referential communication in children with mental retardation. 141 31

Previous research has suggested that individuals with mental retardation are less likely than individuals without mental retardation to access and incorporate information about the relations between words of sentences in the representations of those sentences in memory (e.g., Merrill & Bilsky, 1990; Merrill & Jackson, in press). A cued recall study and a semantic verification study were conducted to determine whether the magnitude of this group difference could be made smaller by increasing the degree to which the words in the sentences were semantically related. In both experiments, individuals with mental retardation exhibited an ability to utilize contextual information to a greater extent when the words were related. In the highly related conditions, the differences between groups was virtually eliminated.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 Sep
PMID:Degree of associative relatedness and sentence processing by adolescents with and without mental retardation. 141 32

The prelinguistic intentional communicative behaviors of 10 noninstitutionalized children with profound mental retardation were analyzed according to five profile parameters: communicative rate, communicative function, discourse structure, communicative means, and syllable shape. Subjects used a predominance of regulatory communicative functions, initiated discourse structure, gestural communicative means, and nontranscribable vocalizations/vocalizations without consonants. Findings were compared to previously reported data from children without mental retardation and institutionalized children with severe and profound mental retardation.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 Sep
PMID:Profile of the prelinguistic intentional communicative behaviors of children with profound mental retardation. 141 33

Rate of linguistic imitation by 48 children with Down syndrome was compared to that of 57 children without mental retardation. Both groups were taken from different corpora within the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES, MacWhinney, 1991). All speech data were collected from spontaneous speech samples of mothers interacting with their children. Three types of imitative utterances (exact, expanded, and reduced) were coded using an automatic data analysis program called CHIP (Sokolov & MacWhinney, 1990). Multiple regression was utilized to test for group differences while controlling for variability in MLU. The results indicated that children with Down syndrome imitated slightly less, but the exact nature of this difference was related to language level and the source of the imitation. As MLU increased, the rate of imitation decreased at a much steeper rate for children without mental retardation than for children with Down syndrome. In addition, children with Down syndrome showed a different pattern of results for imitations of their mothers than for self-repeated imitations. The results suggest that children with Down syndrome develop differently with respect to linguistic imitation.
Am J Ment Retard 1992 Sep
PMID:Linguistic imitation in children with Down syndrome. 141 34

We examined the play behavior of 18 kindergarten children without mental retardation and 55 children with different levels of mental retardation, all with a developmental age of 4 to 5 years, and found few differences between the groups with regard to activity, types and quality of play, and play content. Qualitative differences as described in the literature were not confirmed. This may have been due to (a) the play situation, which was an individual contact with a stimulating adult and/or (b) the fact that MA and not CA was the standard of comparison. Consequently, mild to moderate mental retardation seems in itself insufficient reason to exclude children from play intervention programs.
Ment Retard 1992 Oct
PMID:Imaginative play in children with mental retardation. 143 78

Building upon Goffman's idea of a courtesy stigma (a stigma acquired as a result of being related to a person with a stigma), I examined how family members maintain community ties while coping with a child who clearly disvalues them. In the early 1970s, I reported that parents develop strategies to make an unmanageable problem manageable. In this paper the various responses to the courtesy stigma concept were examined with regard to the field of mental retardation in particular and disability in general. Also examined was how the social attribution of stigma serves to create distinctions, moral and otherwise, in our society.
Ment Retard 1992 Oct
PMID:Courtesy stigma revisited. 143 79


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