Res Dev Disabil
August 2024
Background: Narrative ability is crucial for social participation in everyday and school life but involves different language abilities such as vocabulary and morpho-syntax. This is particularly difficult for individuals who display both language and cognitive impairments. Previous research has identified productive vocabulary as a possible key factor for narrative performance in individuals with Down syndrome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNowadays, digital media are already very present in childhood. Due to their language-based content and high attractiveness for children, they may offer a high potential for language promotion. However, in order for their effectiveness as language teachers, the content needs to be relevant for language promotion and to be attentively and repeatedly processed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
October 2023
Introduction: Narrative abilities are an important part of our everyday lives and social interaction with others. Nevertheless, narration is a complex ability influenced by language and cognition. This makes it difficult for individuals with language and cognitive impairment, such as in children and adolescents with Down syndrome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Appl Res Intellect Disabil
January 2024
Introduction: Narratives are enriched by taking the perspective of the protagonists, which can be expressed using reported speech. Nevertheless, the use of reported speech is unaddressed internationally among individuals with Down syndrome.
Method: Narratives of 28 children and adolescents with Down syndrome were collected using a non-verbal picture book.
Introduction: The present study provides longitudinal data on the development of receptive and expressive grammar in children and adolescents with Down syndrome and addresses the role of nonverbal cognitive abilities and verbal short-term memory for morphosyntactic development.
Method: Seventeen German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome (aged 4;6-17;1 years at first testing (T1)) were assessed twice, 4;4-6;6 years apart. For a subset of five participants, there was also a third assessment 2 years after the second.
Introduction: To date, the evidence regarding False Belief (FB) abilities in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) has been both sparse and contradictory. Our study is the first systematic investigation targeting the relation between FB, mental age (MA), syntactic abilities (SA) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) in individuals with DS so far.
Method: 27 German-speaking children/adolescents with DS (aged 10;0-20;1 years) completed a location-change FB-task and four standardized measures assessing nonverbal intelligence & MA, VSTM, receptive and productive SA.
Like many other languages, German employs a linguistic category called "grammatical gender." In gender-marking languages each noun is assigned to a particular gender-class (in German: masculine, feminine or neuter) and other words in a sentence which are grammatically controlled by the noun are marked by particular morphemes according to the noun's gender feature - so called gender agreement. Within psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension, it is often assumed that gender agreement might help to predict the continuation of a sentence on grammatical grounds and to reduce the lexical search space for the next words emerging within the speech signal.
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