Language learning in children with Down syndrome (DS): Receptive and expressive morphosyntactic abilities

Down syndrome is the most common known cause of intellectual disability and occurs in approximately 1 in 700 births. Language skills of children with DS are more severely affected than their nonverbal cognition. Expressive language skills are poorer than receptive ones, especially syntax which tends to be considerably delayed. Moreover, children with DS tend to make more grammatical errors than typically developing children. The purpose of this study is to examine whether morphosyntactic abilities of children with DS are poorer than the abilities of typically developing children, taking into consideration that research is extremely poor in this area and especially in the Greek language. For this purpose, 10 children with DS and 10 typically developing children have been examined in a 45 minute morphosyntactic abilities task. Our findings are in line with previous research, proving that expressive and receptive syntax is delayed and severely affected in children with DS. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.