An investigation into the language skills of monolingual Maltese and English subjects with down syndrome

Abstract

For many years now children with Down syndrome have been recognised as having a wide range of ability and potential, however, language skills have been reported to lag behind the non - verbal cognitive abilities of these children. Several studies aimed at characterising this delay created much controversy. Some reported that language in these children was similar to that of typically developing children, only slower, others suggesting a deviant pattern of language development. It has recently been claimed, by several studies, that although the acquisition strategies of children with Down syndrome are similar to typically developing children, there is a distinctive pattern of language development associated with the morpho - syntactic aspect of language. This study investigated groups of Maltese and English-speaking subjects with Down syndrome compared to control groups of Maltese and English-speaking language matched controls (all subjects being Maltese). The main focus of the investigation was to characterise the grammatical knowledge in Maltese and English of the subjects with Down syndrome and to investigate whether Maltese, a morphologically rich language, is posing greater difficulty than English which is a morphologically sparse language. 6 children with Down syndrome (3 monolingual Maltese and 3 monolingual English), ranging in age from 8 : 04 and 13 : 00; and 6 typically developing children (3 monolingual Maltese and 3 monolingual English), ranging in age from 3: 06 and 4:04 were carefully matched for verbal comprehension and receptive vocabulary. Spontaneous and imitative speech samples were audio recorded and analysed using morpho - syntactic profiles of English and Maltese , devised for the purpose of the study. An analysis of the expressive characteristics of these children revealed that the verbal expressive language of the children with Down syndrome in addition to being delayed, in the sense that it is comparable to their younger, verbal comprehension matched controls on several criteria, is morpho - syntactically deficient. This morpho - syntactic deficit is typically revealed when the children with Down syndrome are compared to the typically developing children. This morpho - syntactic problem is effecting the Maltese speakers and the English speakers in a similar way except that: a) the Maltese speaking subjects with Down syndrome are using more inflections than the English speaking counterparts, b) feature marking is more difficult for the Maltese speaking children with Down syndrome because of the frequency of occurrence of feature marking in the use of the Maltese language. The results obtained from the elicited imitation task demonstrated that the children with Down syndrome omit more function words than the typically developing children and the overall mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUm), in imitative speech of the Down syndrome groups was less than their MLUm in spontaneous speech.