Teaching sight vocabulary to children with developmental disabilities

Abstract

Functional reading has become one of the basic skills to be developed within the population of intellectual disability. A 2 × 2 factorial design was employed in the present study to investigate the effects of manipulating the pictorial stimulus (i.e. fading Vs. nonfading of the picture) in relationship to the variable of word stimulus location (i.e. superimposition Vs. juxtaposition of the picture and work) in orienting the learner's attention to the word in sight word learning. The sample consisted of sixteen nonreading moderately retarded children randomly assigned to one of four training conditions. The number of words each subject learnt was measured by a word recognition, a word identification and a picture-word matching procedure at three different phases of testing. It was found that subjects trained under the superimposed conditions performed significantly better than those in the juxtaposition condition (p <. 001). Fading versus nonfading of the pictorial stimulus was not significant; neither was there a significant interaction effect. The findings were interpreted in relationship to the efficacy of various techniques employed in bringing the learner's attentional focus towards the printed word in the acquisition stage of sight word learning.