تتحددت مشکلة البحث فى محاولة التعرف على الدلالات الشکلية المميزة لرسوم الأطفال ذوى الإعاقة العقلية، وبذلک هدف البحث إلى التعرف على: النسب المئوية للتعبير عن عناصر ومفردات موضوع رسم الأسرة لدى الأطفال المعاقيين عقلياً، والفروق بين النسب المئوية للتعبير عن عناصر ومفردات موضوع رسم الأسرة لدى الأطفال المعاقيين عقلياً وأقرانهم العاديين، والفروق فى التکوين العام للوحة المرسومة لموضوع الأسرة بين الأطفال العاديين وأقرانهم المعاقين عقليا، والفروق فى التعبير عن الشکل العام للعنصر الإنسانى فى موضوع الأسرة بين الأطفال العاديين وأقرانهم المعاقين عقليا، والفروق فى التعبير عن تفاصيل الشکل الإنسانى فى موضوع الأسرة بين الأطفال العاديين وأقرانهم المعاقين عقليا.
ولتحقيق ذلک استخدم البحث المنهج الوصفي التحليلي، کما تم استخدام أداتين هما استطلاع رأى عن موضوع الرسم، وقائمة تحليل الرسوم (إعداد الباحث)، واقتصرت عينة البحث على أطفال الروضة العاديين، وأطفال المؤسسات والجمعيات الأهلية المهتمة بالأطفال المعاقين عقلياً فى مراکز (المنيا ، وسمالوط ، وبنى مزار ، وملوى ) بمحافظة المنيا وقد بلغ مجموعهم (131) طفلاً وطفلة.
أسفرت النتائج عن أن الأطفال المعاقين عقليا عندما يطلب منهم رسم الأسرة يظهرون فى رسومهم دلالات شکلية تختلف عما ينتجه أقرانهم العاديون ، وأن هذه الدلالات فى مجملها غير سوية تدل على ضعف فى التمثيل البصرى للأشکال الطبيعية وبالأخص الأشکال الإنسانية ، وتتراوح هذه الدلالات بين حذف وتشويه فى الشکل وشخبطة وتظليل متعارض مع بعضه البعض ومحو زائد وطمس للأشکال وضغط على الخطوط وفقدان للتنظيم واستخدام محدود للألوان ورسم أشکال مائلة غير مستقرة وتصغير لعناصر الرسم أو تکبير بشکل مبالغ فيه لبعض هذه العناصر وعدم ترابط بين الوحدات المرسومة. Abstract Researchers had an increasing interest in children's drawings at the end of the 19th as a language of spoken and written speech. As the studies dealing with these drawings increase, they were considered a way to express the psychological characteristics and mental abilities of children, because when a child draws, he/she simply automatically expresses his/her thoughts, needs, feelings, and emotions, then his/her drawings are transformed to a rich language that reveals his/her personality, tendencies, and various abilities. Children's drawings do not require the verbal aspect, so they are suitable for assessing children who suffering from expressive language problems or having cerebral palsy and mental disabilities, and at the same time they are suitable for ordinary children, and some features of the drawings may be directly related with maturity, gender, or intellectual ability, in addition to that, they are easy to be applied and corrected and shortly getting their results compared to other measures of mental ability that were criticized, especially when used with children. Accordingly, the researcher studies the drawings' characteristics of the children having intellectual disabilities, aiming to identify the drawings' features that can help to identify and diagnose them, so the problem of the study is to identify the distinctive formal features of the children's drawings with mental disabilities, and thus the aim of the research is to identify: the percentages of the expressing elements and vocabulary of the subject of family drawing, and the differences between these children and their ordinary peers, the differences in the general composition of the painting on the family issue between ordinary children and their mentally handicapped peers, the differences in expressing the general shape of the human element on the family issue between ordinary children and their mentally handicapped peers, and the differences in expressing the details of the human form on the family issue between ordinary children and their peers Mentally handicapped. To achieve this aim, the descriptive and analytical approach is used, utilizing two tools, namely an opinion poll on the drawing subject, and a drawings analysis list (designed by the researcher). The sample was 131 children, and it was limited to ordinary kindergarten children, and mentally handicapped children in the NGOs caring centers (In Minia, Smalout, Bani-Mazar, and Malwy) in Minia governorate. The results showed that for drawing family, the drawings of mentally handicapped children produce different formal connotations compared to normal peers, and that these indications are entirety abnormal indicating a weakness in the visual representation of natural shapes, especially human forms, and these connotations range from deletion, distortion, scribbling and contrasting shading with each other, excessive erasure, blurring of shapes, pressure on lines, loss of organization, limited use of colors, drawing unstable diagonal shapes, minimizing drawing elements, or exaggerating some of these elements and disorganization between the units drawn. The new in the current research is identifying the distinctive formal features of the children's drawings with mental disabilities.