Publications by authors named "Elena Checa"

Our main objective was to analyze the role of imageability in relation to the age of acquisition (AoA) of nouns and verbs in Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome (DS) and their peers with typical development (TD). The AoA of nouns and verbs was determined using the MacArthur-Bates CDIs adapted to the profile of children with DS. The AoA was analyzed using a linear mixed-effect model, including factors of imageability, group, and word class, and controlling for word frequency and word length.

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Purpose: Joint attention is considered a prerequisite for language development. Although language is one of the most impaired domains in Down syndrome (DS), few studies have examined the relationship between caregiver behavior during episodes of joint attention and vocabulary development in these children. Consequently, our primary aim was to analyze the behaviors of caregivers of children with DS and of children with typical development (TD) in the early stages of vocabulary development.

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Purpose: The primary aim of this study was to analyze the acquisition of different classes of words in Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome (DS), with special emphasis on nouns and verbs. A second objective was to compare the results obtained with those reported by Checa et al. (2016), who used a different measure to study vocabulary composition.

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Purpose: There are very few studies, and at present none in Spanish, on vocabulary composition in children with Down syndrome (DS). Nor has the topic been widely assessed in Spanish-speaking children with typical development (TD). This study analyzed the composition of early vocabularies in a large sample of Spanish-speaking children with DS and compared it with that of children with TD.

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Purpose: The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories are widely used to study early language and communicative development. We recently developed a Spanish version for children with Down syndrome (the CDI-Down) adapted to their particular profile of linguistic and communicative development. The principal aims of this study are to assess the concurrent validity and test-retest reliability of the vocabulary section of this adaptation.

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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.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to compare lexical development between Spanish children with Down syndrome (DS) and typically developing (TD) children, focusing on cognitive and vocabulary relationships.
  • 186 children with DS and 186 with TD were assessed using a Spanish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI, with no significant differences in oral language production found.
  • Children with DS showed better lexical comprehension and gestural production, indicating these are strengths, while oral production did not support a clear separation between cognitive ability and vocabulary development.
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Background: It is generally assumed that children with Down syndrome (DS) present a deficit in lexical production relative to their cognitive abilities. However, the literature on this topic has recently shown several contradictory results. In addition, most studies only consider vocabulary production in its vocal modality.

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