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THE RELIABILITY OF A TEST OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ABILITIES (I.T.P.A.) IN A POPULATION OF YOUNG MALE SUBNORMALS

1964; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 19 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/bjms.1964.018

0022-2666

H. C. Günzburg,

Educational and Psychological Assessments

Attention has repeatedly been drawn to the poor language abilities of the subnormal. This refers not so much to pronunciation and enunciation but to his difficulties in understanding what is said to him and expressing correctly what he wants to say. These weaknesses are, of course, associated with his comparatively low intelligence level and with his poor socio-economic background which fails to encourage literacy. Mastery of language is not a school subject by itself, and time spent in academic work at a special school is devoted to the tool subjects, reading, writing and arithmetic, but not to promotion of language. Language which provides the general method of communication among people is something which is assumed will take care of itself, and the subnormal will, like the normal, simply pick-up an understanding for language and its proper use in the course of growing up. This means in fact that much, probably too much, reliance is placed on the subnormal's ability to benefit by incidental learning. As Wall (1962) has pointed out intelligence could quite well be defined as the ability to learn in nonformal teaching situations and is in fact the ability to pick up information whilst going along. Since the subnormal has a relatively low LQ. this particular skill is obviously handicapped and not too much confidence can be placed in his ability to acquire incidental information.