Individual cognitive training of reading disability improves word identification and sentence comprehension in adults with mild mental retardation.
Adults with mild intellectual disability can still gain real reading skills through long, focused cognitive training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Cohen et al. (2006) ran a 60-week cognitive program for adults with mild intellectual disability.
Half got the training. Half stayed on a wait list.
Coaches worked one-on-one to build reading skills.
What they found
Trained adults read words and sentences better than the wait-list group.
The gains were large enough to matter in daily life.
How this fits with other research
Adams et al. (2024) saw no added reading benefit when students with dyslexia did working-memory drills.
The two studies seem to clash, but the people differ: dyslexia is not ID.
LAller et al. (2023) are now testing a long reading program for school kids with ID who use AAC.
Their future data will show if early, aided instruction beats later catch-up.
Why it matters
You can tell funders and families that adults with mild ID still have room to grow.
A year-long, one-on-one cognitive program can move reading scores.
If your learner is older, do not drop literacy goals—start an evidence-based remediation plan instead.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Reading therapy has been shown to be effective in treating reading disabilities (RD) in dyslexic children, but little is known of its use in subjects with mild mental retardation (MR). Twenty adult volunteers, with both RD and mild MR, underwent 60 consecutive weeks in a cognitive remediation program, and were compared with 32 untreated control subjects. The experimental group showed a significant improvement in word identification, as measured by oral production (p=0.0004) or silent reading (p=0.023), and sentence comprehension (p=0.0002). Adults with MR appear to benefit from new approaches in the field of RD.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2006 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2004.07.008