Early Visual Attention Abilities and Audiovisual Speech Processing in 5-7 Month-Old Down Syndrome and Typically Developing Infants.

Jovana Pejovic,Sónia Frota,Cátia Severino,Marisa Cruz

doi:10.3390/brainsci11070939

Abstract

Communicative abilities in infants with Down syndrome (DS) are delayed in comparison to typically developing (TD) infants, possibly affecting language development in DS. Little is known about what abilities might underlie poor communication and language skills in DS, such as visual attention and audiovisual speech processing. This study compares DS and TD infants between 5–7 months of age in a visual orientation task, and an audiovisual speech processing task, which assessed infants’ looking pattern to communicative cues (i.e., face, eyes, mouth, and waving arm). Concurrent communicative abilities were also assessed via the CSBS-DP checklist. We observed that DS infants orient their visual attention slower than TD infants. Both groups attended more to the eyes than the mouth, and more to the face than the waving arm. However, DS infants attended less to the eyes than the background, and equally to the face and the background, suggesting their difficulty to assess linguistically relevant cues. Finally, communicative skills were related to attention to the eyes in TD, but not in DS infants. Our study showed that early attentional and audiovisual abilities are impaired in DS infants, and might underlie their communication skills, suggesting that early interventions in this population should emphasize those skills.

Highlights

Down syndrome (DS) is associated to a genetic perturbation known as trisomy 21 affecting physical, motor, and cognitive functioning
Infants’ latency in orienting to the red lateral light was measured for every trial and averaged for each infant
The current paper focuses on early abilities that might be supporting language development in DS and typically developing (TD) 5–7-months old infants

Summary

Introduction

Down syndrome (DS) is associated to a genetic perturbation known as trisomy 21 affecting physical, motor, and cognitive functioning. It is the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability. DS vastly affects language processing and development [1,2,3,4]. Both language comprehension and production deficits have been described. Growth slopes in comprehension become shallower with age and language production studies demonstrate either delayed or atypical speech patterns (for a review, see [5]), especially in childhood and adolescence (e.g., [6]). Speech impairment in DS extends to later developmental stages affecting DS individuals’ overall communicative skills, and possibly academic success, and general well-being

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