Effects of Verbalization on Sensory-Motor Conceptual Learning in Normal and Mentally Retarded Children

Normal children of the 2nd grade in elementary schools and mental retardates of comparable MA were administered tasks to learn finger mazes with two alternatives at each of nine choice points.At each choice point there was one of two kinds of texture and the textures were set to connect with correct positions.A half of the subjects was asked to verbalize the texture at each choice point.The verbalization facilitated the learning in a great degree, that is, increasing number of subjects who learned successfully the tasks not by memory but by conceptual thinking.Besides, the verbalization made longer response times.These findings suggest that the verbalization forced to change the style of cognitive behavior from impulsivity to reflection.These effects of verbalization were relatively strong for the mentally retarded children.Many studies have reported on sensory-motor learning in human subjects using stylus or finger mazes, but in all these tasks progress of learning was dependent on rather memory than conceptual thinking.The first author of this paper carried out basic studies about conceptual learning in sensory-motor conceptual tasks using finger mazes for normal and mentally retarded children (Matsuda, 1973(Matsuda, , 1974a, b), b).These findings suggested that it seemed to be very difficult to make a concept based on cues of tactual sensory-motor level.Various kind of effects of verballabeling or verbalization have been reported, for example, facilitating visual shape recognition or visual discrimination learning (Cantor, 1955;Katz, 1963; Kendler & Kend1er, 1962;Spiker, 1956), facilitating memory and comprehension of a story (Blank & Frank, 1971;Uchida, 1975), and facilitating association of visual figure and motor response (Hata, 1975) in children.The first purpose of this experiment was to examine whether the verbalization could facilitate the sensory-motor conceptual learning.Matsuda & Matsuda (1980) found that some children learn the sensory-motor conceptual tasks with two alternatives at each of nine choice points not by conceptual thinking but by memory.It was suggested that whether subjects learned the tasks by conceptual thinking or by memory depended on at least partly their differences of type of thinking, reflection-impulsivity (Kagan, 1965), shown typically on re-