Agrammatism in Children with Mental Retardation

Abstract

Children master the intricacies of their native language before they are able to tie a knot, jump rope, or draw a circle. This achievement is so expected that most people rarely give a second thought about how children accomplish this remarkable feat. The child must be aware of and use the rules of syntax before one can be said to have adequate command of language. One group of children in whom the development of language does not occur as expected are children with mental retardation. These children fail to acquire language in the normal course, are bound to be at disadvantage in many aspects of their living. The present study is on the grammatical structures used by children with mental retardation. Language samples of thirty typically developing children and language age matched children with mental retardation were analyzed using Index of Productive Syntax (Scarborough, 1990). While adapting the manual to Malayalam language few grammatical constructions were removed and few modifications were made based in the grammatical structure of Malayalam language. It could be concluded from the present study that in children with mental retardation a number of grammatical structures fail to emerge but develop in the same way as seen in typically developing peers. A period of agrammatic language production is evident in the spoken output of children with mental retardation.