Abstract:
This study aims to investigate language usage of educable mentally retarded children in the following aspects: 1) Language capability 2) The qualitative and quantitative aspects of the interactive verbal experience, and 3) The relationship between language capability and interactive verbal experience. Participants are six 11 to 13 year-old educable mentally retarded children at Rajanukul school selected from 19 students who have the IQ (intellectual quotient) between 50-75, and are not considered as multi-disabilities. Using the Thai auditory comprehension test for pre-school children, the students are ranked according to their test scores. The highest and the lowest scores of the subjects are 83 and 49 from the total of 100. The top 3 subjects were selected as the high group and 3 subjects with lowest scores are selected as the low group. The study of interactive verbal experience reveals that children in both high and low group have more interactive verbal experience with their family than people at the school. Moreover, children in the low group tend to use non-verbal interaction more than verbal interaction. This does not mean that the children in the low group are not able to communicate with other people, but rather, they receive less amount of interactive verbal experience than the children in the high group. For the qualitative study of interactive verbal experience, it is found that the children perform two types of verbal experience: interactive and non-interactive. Most of children's verbal experiences are interactive. Interactive verbal experiences found in this study are 'Expressive', 'Directive', 'Question', and 'Interactive Management' respectively. In addition, non-interactive verbal experience of 'Assertive' is also found. The study of the relationship between the interactive verbal experience and the language capability, positive relationship is found. In other words, the children with high language capability, have more interactive verbal experience. In contrast, to children with low language capability, they have less interactive verbal experience. Therefore, it can be said that interactive verbal experience plays an important role to language capacity of mentally retarded children