| 18. | | 29 American DS/29 TDC matched on linguistic level | Narrative language sample | No difference between groups on syntactic complexity for utterances with lexical and grammatical verbs. The syntactic deficit in DS did not arise from a failure to construct syntactically complex utterances, but may reflect difficulty in accessing verbs when constructing utterances due to deficits in auditory short-term memory. |
| 19. | | 10 English WS (CA: 6.9 - 13.10 years, mean MA: 4.8 years)/10 DS (CA: 5.11 - 14.0 years, mean MA: 4.6 years)/10 TDC (CA: 3.3 - 6.5 years, mean MA: 5.0 years) | WISC III/WPSSI-R TROG2 Test of Active and Passive Sentences (TAPS) A wh-question elicitation task based on Thornton’s (1990) elicitation technique and on Varlokosta (2004) assessed knowledge of wh-movement A wh-question comprehension task based on Varlokosta (2004) assessed understanding of wh-questions A wh-question repetition task | WS + DS similar performance on the standardized measure of grammatical ability and on the experimental tasks that tapped comprehension of passives, and production and comprehension of wh-questions, however, both groups scored significantly below their MA-matched peers mostly in the syntactic tasks. DS: poorer performance than other groups on the repetition of wh-questions. WS + DS: difficulties with the comprehension and production of past tense, significantly better performance in active sentences, no difference in the understanding of ambiguous sentences, poorer performance on both full and short passives (worse on sentences with irregular verbs), while experienced difficulties in wh-question interpretation and production. DS: significantly more reversal responses. Wh-subject questions were the easiest for all groups and which NP-object the most difficult. |
| 20. | | 28 American DS (CA: 18 - 35 years)/28 with mental retardation of unknown etiology (CA: 22 - 35 years) | K-ABC Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices Auditory Sequential Memory and the Visual Sequential Memory tests of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA AS, ITPA VS) Wepman-Morency Auditory Memory Span Test (WM AMST) | DS: significantly poorer performance on the global measures of morphology and syntax, and in all subcategories except for nouns and simple sentence structure. Different linguistic and cognitive profiles of two groups, though differences in cognitive abilities could not account for the difference in linguistic ability nor the impaired hearing or middle ear infection during childhood. The linguistic ability of the adults with DS does not deteriorate with age before the age of 35 years in terms of expressive lexical, morphological, or syntactic ability. ITPA auditory sequential memory test: best predicted the morphology, syntax, and total language scores for the adults with DS. |