Efficacy of Speech Therapy with Educable Mentally Retarded Children
A two-phase study was conducted to evaluate the articulatory abilities of 777 educable mentally retarded children between the ages of 6 to 16 years in a public school setting. In Phase I, an analysis of articulation acquisition by mental age was computed. The children were then divided into speech-deviant and normal groups, and the articulatory skills of the speech deviant group were analyzed. Substitution and omission errors tended to decrease with increasing mental age, but distortion errors increased. Phase II was an attempt to evaluate the effect of articulation therapy on sound error reduction over a three-year period. The speech-deviant group was subdivided into three groups: Experimental, Placebo, and Control. Differences in sound error reduction among the three groups were not significant.