0 A person's mental age is a measurement of their ability to think when compared to the average person's ability at that age:
Thus, in the present study children were excluded if they had a receptive language mental age of less than 4 years.
There are, however, a number of exceptions to this general rule of "normal" mental age-appropriate language.
In the autism group, children with a higher mental age were less likely to display actions that expressed jealousy during the play scenario.
This suggests that the ability to learn and apply rules develops with mental age.
Across diagnostic groups, performance on the rule-based conditions was related to receptive language mental age.
These relationships persist beyond a common association with chronological and verbal mental age.
Visuospatial abilities usually lag behind expectations based on mental age.
As expected, we found that receptive language mental age was positively correlated with rule-based categorization ability for all groups of children.
