| 24. | | 50 American DS (CA: 10 - 21 years)/29 with ID (CA: 10 - 21 years)/29 TDC (CA: 4 - 9 years) | PPVT-4 Leiter-R Nonword Repetition subtest of the CTOPP | ID performed significantly better than both DS + TD on verb items but not on nouns or attributes. DS + TD: same pattern of lexical knowledge, performing better on nouns than both verbs and attributes, while ID participants performed similarly on nouns and verbs, but worse on attributes. CA and cognitive ability are significant correlates of receptive vocabulary for participants with DS. The pattern of results in the DS-TD contrast changed after adding phonological memory as a covariate, DS performed significantly better than the group with TD on overall receptive vocabulary but there were no group differences on verb knowledge. |
| 25. | | 9 American DS (CA: 11.11 - 32.10 years)/9 receptive vocabulary age-matched and gender TDC (CA: 3.2 - 13.6 years) | 1st session: PPVT-4, digit-span task, a word-span task, a sentence-repetition task, a single word-naming task, and the hearing screening. 2nd session: digit-span task with nonverbal response, a word-span task with nonverbal response, a spatial-memory task, a single-word comprehension task, a grammaticality judgment task, and a narrative task. Three memory tasks: a digit span task, a word-span task, and a spatial-memory task (TAPS-3) | DS: significantly worse than the TD group on the sentence memory task, while performed similarly to the TD group on all other measures of memory skills. So, their memory deficits are not tied to linguistic stimuli or verbal responses, per se, but may instead be tied to language processing. DS: significantly worse than TDC in judging sentences grammatically. DS: significantly more omissions of verbs in elicited narratives. Specific expressive deficit in verb and argument structure retrieval (but not comprehension) that varies as a function of verb type. |
| 26. | | 32 German DS (CA: 4.07 - 19.00 years)/16 German TDC (CA: 3.01 - 5.00 years) | An elicitation task on subject-verb agreement; A picture-naming task targeting stem-final consonants and express verbal agreement; A measure of phonological short-term memory (Nonword-Repetition subtest of Sprachentwicklungstestfürdrei- bis fünfjährige Kinder); TROG-D | DS: large variability in performance on subject-verb agreement (11 of individuals had successfully acquired subject-verb agreement and 16 individuals did not reach the acquisition criterion). A substantial number of children/adolescents with DS displayed a deficit in verbal agreement inflection that cannot be attributed to phonetic/phonological problems. Performance with verbal agreement and nonword repetition were related. Individuals with DS who displayed problems with the verbal agreement system had no significantly lower production scores of stem-final consonants. The morphosyntactic features expressed by the verbal agreement markers had not been acquired by the individuals of the DS−AGR subgroup who did not reach the acquisition criterion of subject- verb agreement. Deviant development rather than a delay in the DS’s language. |