Establishing Letter-Sound Correspondences in Children Classified as Trainable Mentally Retarded

The study assessed the efficacy of an action mnemonic procedure for teaching children with mental retardation letter-sound correspondences. Seven trainable level children served as subjects. All subjects were trained on four sets of three graphemes. A modified multiple-probe technique was used for each subject. The training of each set consisted of two phases. In Phase 1, the subjects were trained to emit the appropriate action-sounds (phonemes) in the presence of pictures incorporating the target letter. Phase 2 was aimed at shifting the control from the pictures to the graphemes through prompt-fading. All subjects acquired the target skill without making many errors, and maintained most of it (M = 84.6%) over a period of 100 days.