Parental Reports of Spoken Language Skills in Children With Down Syndrome

TLDR

The study compared spoken language skills between children with Down syndrome and a normative group. The authors assessed 330 children with Down syndrome (ages 1–5) and 336 age‑matched controls using the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory‑words and sentences to evaluate vocabulary, pragmatic, grammar, and maximum utterance length. Children with Down syndrome reached comparable language levels to younger normative peers by ages 3–4, but when matched for vocabulary size they lagged slightly on pragmatic and grammar skills, indicating that early development follows exponential or logistic growth and highlighting the potential benefit of early intervention.

Abstract

Spoken language in children with Down syndrome and in children in a normative group was compared. Growth trends, individual variation, sex differences, and performance on vocabulary, pragmatic, and grammar scales as well as MaxLU (maximum length of utterance) were explored. Subjects were 330 children withDown syndrome (age range: 1–5 years) and 336 children in a normative group (1;4–2;4 years;months). The Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory-words and sentences (SECDI-w&s) was employed. Performance of children with Down syndrome at ages 3;0 and 4;0 was comparable with that ofchildren in the normative group at ages 1;4 and 1;8 respectively. In comparison with children in the normative group of similar vocabulary size, children with Down syndrome lagged slightly on pragmatic and grammar scales. The early development proceeded in most cases with exponential or logistic growth. This stresses the great potential of early intervention.