| 9. | | 108 Spanish DS/108 Spanish TDC [both MA 9 - 29 months] | Brunet-Lézine Psychomotor Development Scale-Rev CDI-Down | Similar performance of children with DS + TD with the same vocabulary size. The only significant difference: larger production of nouns by children with DS. DS: greater competency in the cognitive than in the linguistic domain. No differences between them in the production of closed-class words. DS: greater diversity (more types) of lexical verbs, although the use of these verbs (tokens) was less frequent among the children with DS, who produced more utterances without a verb. |
| 10. | | 8 high-functioning DS (CA: 11 - 33 years) | An act-out task and a written forced-choice comprehension task PPVT TACL Gates-MacGinitie reading test Truth Value Judgement | Some, if not all, persons with DS could deal well with the passives. In line of DS: benefit from the elimination of the by-phrase in non-actional passives. Standardized tests are not always good predictors of grammatical ability, as emerged from the comparison in the comprehension and production abilities of two subjects. |
| 11. | | 10 Italian DS (CA: 6.1 - 15.4 years)/10 MLU-matched TDC (CA: 2.6 - 6 years) | Story description tasks | Strong individual differences in DS sample. Two groups comparable lexical + morphological repertoire, but DS delayed performance (conjunctions and clitic pronouns). DS: more omissions of function words, greater use of simple clauses, more prompting in narrative task with unrelated descriptions, more inaccurate language production. |
| 12. | | 62 French DS (mean CA: 14.8 years)/62 ID (mean CA: 14.92 years) matched on CA and non-verbal cognitive level | French version of the Test for Reception of Grammar Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices French version of the PPVT | Continuous progress of vocabulary and receptive syntax from childhood to adulthood. Although the chronological effect size was small for syntax and moderate for vocabulary (4% and 15% of the explained variance, respectively), results showed a linear increase of tests cores between childhood and adulthood for those with undifferentiated etiology and those with DS. The results also showed that the relationship between CA and test scores was significantly stronger for vocabulary than for syntax and that participants with undifferentiated etiology performed better than participants with DS, whatever the test. Significant effects of CA and diagnosis, but the CA × diagnosis interactions were nonsignificant. Comprehension of vocabulary and syntax does not asymptote prematurely in individuals with DS. |