Forming inflection and word-formation operations in preschoolers with mental retardation

Introduction. At the present stage of societal development, great attention is paid to issues affecting the psychological and pedagogical support in the educational process of children with disabilities. One general pattern of dysontogenetic development is violation of speech mediation. The most important areas of assistance to children with special educational needs are: identifying speech defect specifics and creating additional special conditions that will facilitate assimilation of educational programs and the social development of each student’s personality. The study aims to develop and test a program for forming inflection and word-formation operations in preschoolers with mental retardation. Materials and methods. The study involved 92 preschoolers aged 6-7 with mental retardation. The research methods were: Methodology of psycholinguistic study of oral speech disorders in children by R.I. Lalaeva, Diagnostics of oral speech of children aged 4-7 by N.V. Nishcheva; mathematical statistics: χ2-Pearson criterion. Results. The ascertaining experiment showed that preschoolers with mental retardation are characterized by predominantly low level of formation of inflection and word-formation operations. Specific difficulties were identified: omission or incorrect use of prepositions in speech; errors in changing nouns in indirect cases; deficiencies in the agreement of an adjective with a noun in the neuter gender; lexical substitutions of nouns, verbs when forming new words using suffixes and prefixes; replacement and incorrect use of suffixes while forming relative and possessive adjectives, etc. After the formative experiment, significant shifts occurred both in the level of noun inflection operations (χ2 = 19.739; p ≤ 0.05) where the number of children at a low level decreased from 64% to 32%, and in the level of verb word-formation operations (χ2 = 30.61; p ≤ 0.05) where the number of children at an average level increased from 39% to 58%. Conclusion. Preschoolers with mental retardation experience difficulties in grammatically designing speech utterances. The data obtained in the experiment show that speech difficulties are due to the delayed development of inflection and word-formation operations and the qualitative peculiarity of the manifestation of the defect. Studying grammatical operations in young children with mental retardation and the specifics of the manifestation of this disorder in written speech is a promising further direction.