Communication Breakdowns and Repair Strategies of Children with Down Syndrome

Abstract

The study compared communication breakdowns and repairs during mother-child interactions of children with Down syndrome (DS) and typically developing (TD) children. Thirty-four children with DS and 36 TD children participated with their mothers. Mother-child conversational samples were evaluated for rate of breakdown, rate of resolution of breakdowns, and types of linguistic strategies used by both children and mothers during breakdowns. After controlling for maternal education levels, children's nonverbal developmental levels, and children's expressive vocabulary levels, children with DS experienced significantly more communication breakdowns, compared to TD children. The two groups did not differ in their rates of resolving breakdowns. Mothers in each group did not differ in the types of requests for clarification they used, but children in each group showed some differences in the types of repairs they produced, with children with DS using more repetitions and fewer revisions with additional information. Children with DS and their mothers showed some differences in their communication breakdown rate and repair strategies, compared to TD children-mother dyads. However, these differences appear to support effective resolution of communication breakdowns.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Communication Assessment and Intervention

“…More specifically, from the five assessment-related papers, readers should gain an appreciation of the value of assessing foundational aspects of communication. The five assessment-related papers contained in this special issue cover a number of cutting-edge issues, such as assessment of early emergent communication skills (Ogletree and Price 2018), assessment of early vocalizations (Roche et al 2018), communication intentionality (Peters-Scheffer et al 2018), breakdown and repair strategies (Price et al 2018), and the social communication of students with profound/multiple disabilities (Arthur-Kelly et al 2018). The remaining six papers address interventions for enhancing the communication functioning of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders and developmental delay (Allen et al 2018;Carnett et al 2018;Dimian et al 2018;Hansen et al 2018;Simacek et al 2018;Wolf et al 2018).…”