
concept learning in culturally disadvantaged children as
a function of verbal pretraining.
while research indicates that verbal pretraining
has a positive influence on the discrimination
learning performance of subjects
of normal intelligence, a comparable
influence has not been shown for other types
of conceptual tasks for retarded subjects.
the purpose of this experiment was
to investigate the effects of stimulus
pretraining on concept learning by subjects
who had a 'high risk' of being classified
as mentally retarded at some future time.
a group of 27 'higher risk' and 27 'lower
risk' subjects was randomly divided into
3 pretraining groups: verbal label, attention,
and control.  subsequent to pretraining on
the stimuli used for transfer task 1, subjects
in each group were presented with a
concept learning task (transfer task 1).
after reaching the criterion of learning on
transfer task 1, subjects were presented
with a second, new, concept learning task.
analysis of the data revealed that there
were no significant performance differences
between risk groups and that pretraining
had a significantly positive effect on performance.
