The Effect of Warm-Up on Rote Learning Performance

The primary purpose of this investigation was to determine if mentally retarded subjects, when compared to nonretarded subjects, exhibit a deficit in the early stages of rote verbal learning. Its second purpose was to determine if the hypothesized early stage deficit in retarded children could be reduced. Ninety mentally retarded and 90 nonretarded subjects were randomly assigned to three pretraining groups. The pretraining task was a list of four nonmeaningful paired associates. One group received no pretraining, the second received 3 trials on the pretraining list, and the third, 9 trials. The experimental task consisted of six nonmeaningful paired associates. Analysis of the data indicated that the retarded subjects exhibited a pronounced deficit in the early stage of learning and that pretraining had no effect on performance.