Semantic processing in children with Down Syndrome

Abstract

This research focuses on language processing, and more specifically on semantic processing, in children with Down Syndrome (DS). It has repeatedly been documented that children with DS display severe deficits in all language domains, semantics among others, and especially in their expressive language. Therefore, our purpose was to detect possible differences between receptive and expressive language in the semantic domain in DS and to compare semantic processing, both receptive and expressive, of children with DS with that of children with typical development. For this purpose we examined two groups of children, a group of children with Down Syndrome (DS) and a group of children with typical development (TD), aged 4-7.11 years old. Our findings proved that children with DS scored lower than typically developing children in all semantic tasks, whether receptive or expressive and that their performance was lower in the expressive language tasks than the receptive ones