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Taken together, these findings suggest that in addition to the well-documented global delays in early communicative development, children with DS may exhibit additional pockets of delay, specifically in making the transition from one- to two-word speech. Results are further discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the organization of the developing gesture-language system and for the assessment of gesture in young children with communicative delays and disorders.

This study investigated the development of language and communication in children with Down syndrome (DS). More specifically, the aim was to examine the relations among verbal comprehension, verbal production, and gesture production in the very early stages of development. Forty children (age range: 10-49 months) with DS and 40 children with normal development (age range: 8-17 months) participated in this study. Children with DS came from two Italian health centers. The communicative and linguistic development of children with DS was measured by administering the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. The children with DS were severely delayed when compared with normally developing children in reaching the developmental stages. In such children a dissociation emerged between verbal comprehension and production, in favor of comprehension, whereas a synchronous development was found between vocal lexical comprehension and gestural production. The individual differences previously reported in these children are also evident in all domains examined. There were no significant differences between children with DS and typically developing controls matched for lexical comprehension on verbal production. However the two groups differed significantly in gestural development, suggesting a "gesture advantage" in children with DS compared with controls matched for word comprehension. Some possible reasons for this dissociative profile are discussed.

A structured questionnaire for evaluating the level of communicative and linguistic development at 12, 16 and 20 months of age respectively was administered to the parents of 23 children for three different assessments. For a subsample of 14 subjects the questionnaire was filled in by the parents and by a trained observer in a two-hour observational session at home. The aim of the study was two-fold: (a) to verify the validity of the instrument and specifically its predictive validity; (b) to verify the reliability of the information given by parents through a direct comparison between the data in the questionnaire filled in by the parents and the data in the same questionnaire filled in by the observer. Results show that, on the basis of measures reported at 12 months, the instrument can predict linguistic development at 20 months as evaluated by means of a Vocabulary Checklist. Furthermore, the pattern of communicative and linguistic development reported by parents is consistent with that reported by the observer. Finally, the sample's lexical development exhibits a wide range of individual variation, with lexicons consisting of about 8 to 628 different words at 20 months of age.

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