Language Differences Between Children With Down Syndrome Familial Mental Impairment And Typically Developing Peers

Download or read book Language Differences Between Children With Down Syndrome, Familial Mental Impairment And Typically Developing Peers written by Aggeliki Kotsopoulos and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Objectives: The focus of this study was to compare the language profiles between children with mental impairment (MI) and typically developing (TD) peers.Background: The current research strongly supports that the different language systems are developing with different rates at special mental retarded populations, even if the individuals with MI show the same cognitive functioning level.Materials and Methods:The participants were: a) 9 children with Down syndrome (DS) b) 9 children with Familial Mental Impairment (FMI) and c) two control groups (18 TD children). All participants were monolingual Greek-speaking children aged 7-10 years old. The participants with MI could form sentences with at least 2-3 words. The assessment included: The Greek version of Raven's Progressive Matrices A, B, AB (Sideridis et al., 2015) and a battery of nine language tests. For the comparison between the different groups (a) DS-TD, b) FMI-TD, c) DS-FMI) regression statistical analysis was used to assimilate the comparison groups for IQ. The groups wese similar for age and gender.Results and Conclusions:The results of the study showed that: a) The FMI group in comparison to the TD group had difficulties in language comprehension, narrative, social speech, as well as phonological and semantic deficits. b) DS children faced greater difficulties than TD children in all aspects of speech c) DS children in comparison with children with FMI had more serious difficulties in language comprehension and expression. Specifically, they faced greater deficits in definitions, narrative and social speech.The results support the developmental model for FMI and a close phenotype-genotype relationship in different MI syndromes.