Receptive number morphosyntax in children with Down syndrome

Abstract

This study investigated the comprehension of plural morphosyntactic markers and its relationship with numerical comparison abilities in children with Down syndrome (DS). It evaluated 16 Spanish-speaking children with DS (mean verbal mental age = 3;6) and 16 typically developing children with similar receptive vocabulary (mean chronological age = 3;5). Children participated in two preferential looking tasks assessing their abilities to map singular and plural markers to their visual referents and to distinguish one object from more than one. Results showed that both groups of children correctly mapped plural markers to their referents but failed to map singular ones. Furthermore, results also indicated that both groups also looked at collections of more than one object with four objects but not at those with two. The eye movement patterns of children who looked at collections of more than one object suggest a counting-like strategy. These results indicate that comprehension of plural markers of children with DS is similar to that of their typically developing peers; however, it is not related to their numerical abilities.

Perceptual Dissimilarity and Cognitive Performance Predict Novel Word Retention, but Not Extension Skills in Down Syndrome

“…Thus, it is unclear whether participants with DS may encounter difficulty using word-learning mechanisms that require greater cognitive demands that tap into other domains, such as phonology or morphology. For example, people with DS experience particular challenges producing morphemes (Galeote et al, 2014), but the comprehension of some morphemes is preserved (Abreu-Mendoza et al, 2020). Future studies should investigate whether children with DS, despite their impairments in production and working memory, employ morphological information to bootstrap the meaning of new words, as do children with TD (Jolly & Plunkett, 2008).…”