Development of Listening Skills in Retarded Children:

Abstract

Listening skills, assessed by examining the attentional behaviors and recall accuracy on two sentence-instruction tasks and on a story listening task, were evaluated in one training and two generalization situations, one outside of and one within a classroom situation, for four educable mentally retarded boys. Two modified “say-do-say” correspondence training procedures, one to increase attention directly and one to increase generalized attention, and a feedback reinforcement procedure to increase accuracy of immediate recall in a listening situation were separately and sequentially introduced in a multiple baseline design across subjects. One subject introduced in a multiple baseline design across subjects. One subject increased attention and accuracy of recall across situations after the introduction of the direct correspondence training procedure. Because two subjects failed to show generalized attentional behavior and accurate recall, the other two training procedures were introduced. Subsequently, attentional skills across settings increased for both subjects. The fourth subject, due to time limitations introduced only to the direct correspondence training procedure, showed direct and generalized attentional changes. The potential contributions of these procedures to developing a technology of listening behavior are discussed.