One group of 24 noninstitutionalized retarded Ss and three groups of normal Ss (ns = 26, 26, 21) labeled chromatic pictures of nouns in a study of the development of their lexicons. Lexical store development was related more to cognitive development (MA) than chronological age. This development was also more highly related with Carroll and White's measure of age of acquisition of words than to word frequencies in the Thorndike-Lorge word count. The retarded group's relative efficiency decreased as ease of labeling increased; this led to increasing decrement in performance below expected performance for that MA. This regress in lexical lag was discussed in terms of ages at which words are acquired and the earlier deficiencies of retarded children's lexicons. Comparisons of the several corpora were made in terms of their use in matching normal and retarded groups on experimental tasks in verbal learning.
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