| 13. | | 33 Irish DS (mean MA: 79.27 months)/32 with cognitive impairment of unknown etiology (mean MA: 83.91 months)/33 TDC (mean MA: 79.21 months) | Leiter-3 Subtests from WMTC-C A version from WMTB-C Hearing screen TROG-2 A devised animation task (TECS-E) | DS: performed at a significantly lower level. All three groups performed best on relative clauses, while children’s performance on adverbial and complement clauses was similar within each group. DS: disproportionate difficulty understanding complex sentences. Understanding of syntax in DS is not completely explained by poor cognitive or memory skills, rather it appears to be a specific deficit that may distinguish these children from other with neurodevelopmental disorders. |
| 14. | | 108 Spanish DS (mean CA: 41.11 years, mean MA: 21.26 years)/108 TD (mean CA: 20.19 years, mean MA: 20.23 years) | Brunet-Lézine Psychomotor Development Scale-Revised for MA, MacArthur-Bates CDIs (CDI-Down) | DS: fewer predicates and closed-class words than their peers with TD, also fewer verbs (statistically significant at the lexical level of 251 - 400 words). The proportion of social words was the highest across all lexical levels. At the first three levels (≤10, 11 - 50, and 51 - 100 words) no differences between the proportions of nouns, predicates and closed-class words, all of which were very low. At the final level (≥401 words) equivalent proportion of predicates and nouns. |
| 15. | | 92 Spanish DS/92 TDC (both MA: 20 - 29 months) | Adaptation of the CDI | DS: shorter utterances, with less morphosyntactic complexity and less morphological suffixes than TDC, despite having the same MA. Similar developmental pattern, although slower in DS. No differences between children with DS and vocabulary-matched children with TD in their abilities to combine words and their MLU. DS: lower performance in terms of morphosyntactic complexity and morphological suffixes. The differences tended to appear around a lexical mass of 200 - 300 words. |
| 16. | | 7 American DS (CA: 6.2 - 12.2 years)/7 TDC (CA: 2.4 - 2.8 years) | Language transcripts | DS children omitted subject arguments as frequently as TDC. Both groups were likely to omit subject arguments in intransitive as in transitive verb constructions. DS omitted more subject arguments than arguments in the direct object position. TDC more likely to produce anomalous arguments than children with DS. |
| 17. | | 7 American DS (CA: 6.2 - 12.2 years)/7 TDC (CA: 2.4 - 2.8 years) | Language transcripts | DS: produced a larger variety of lexical verbs as frequently as their normally developing counterparts, but infrequently used sentence complements, sentential embedding, or compound sentences. Comparable level of syntactic development for both groups. Asynchrony between lexical and syntactic development, and when compared to syntactic development, children with DS show a relative strength in expressive vocabulary. |