Early grammatical development in Spanish children with Down syndrome

Abstract

The objective of this work was to analyze morphosyntactic development in a wide sample of children with Down syndrome (DS) (n = 92) and children with typical development (TD) (n = 92) with a mental age (MA) of 20 to 29 months. Children were individually matched for gender and MA (Analysis 1) and for vocabulary size (Analysis 2). Information about morphosyntax was obtained using an adaptation of the CDI for children with DS. In both analyses, the number of children with DS and with TD who combined words was similar. Analysis 1 showed that children with DS produced shorter utterances, with less morphosyntactic complexity and less morphological suffixes than children with TD, despite having the same mental age. The developmental pattern was similar, although slower in children with DS. Analysis 2 showed that the performance of children with DS was lower than the performance of children with TD in relation to morphosyntactic complexity and morphological suffixes.