The language skills of children with Down's Syndrome aged 12 to 16 years

Abstract

Linguistic information gained through the analysis of video recordings of 11 children with Down's Syndrome is described. It was found that even at this age, when children are becoming more socially capable and indepen dent, verbal language was limited mainly to single-word utterances. Those children with more words in a sequence were often at a disadvantage, due to poor intelligibility which increased with increased complexity of syntax. On the whole, children were sensitive to the rules of conversation, but had major difficulties in initiating or performing repair strategies. Signing seemed to be the most useful form of repair. Remedial implications are briefly discussed.