No abstract

Taken together, these findings suggest that in addition to the well-documented global delays in early communicative development, children with DS may exhibit additional pockets of delay, specifically in making the transition from one- to two-word speech. Results are further discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the organization of the developing gesture-language system and for the assessment of gesture in young children with communicative delays and disorders.

This study investigated the development of language and communication in children with Down syndrome (DS). More specifically, the aim was to examine the relations among verbal comprehension, verbal production, and gesture production in the very early stages of development. Forty children (age range: 10-49 months) with DS and 40 children with normal development (age range: 8-17 months) participated in this study. Children with DS came from two Italian health centers. The communicative and linguistic development of children with DS was measured by administering the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. The children with DS were severely delayed when compared with normally developing children in reaching the developmental stages. In such children a dissociation emerged between verbal comprehension and production, in favor of comprehension, whereas a synchronous development was found between vocal lexical comprehension and gestural production. The individual differences previously reported in these children are also evident in all domains examined. There were no significant differences between children with DS and typically developing controls matched for lexical comprehension on verbal production. However the two groups differed significantly in gestural development, suggesting a "gesture advantage" in children with DS compared with controls matched for word comprehension. Some possible reasons for this dissociative profile are discussed.

A structured questionnaire for evaluating the level of communicative and linguistic development at 12, 16 and 20 months of age respectively was administered to the parents of 23 children for three different assessments. For a subsample of 14 subjects the questionnaire was filled in by the parents and by a trained observer in a two-hour observational session at home. The aim of the study was two-fold: (a) to verify the validity of the instrument and specifically its predictive validity; (b) to verify the reliability of the information given by parents through a direct comparison between the data in the questionnaire filled in by the parents and the data in the same questionnaire filled in by the observer. Results show that, on the basis of measures reported at 12 months, the instrument can predict linguistic development at 20 months as evaluated by means of a Vocabulary Checklist. Furthermore, the pattern of communicative and linguistic development reported by parents is consistent with that reported by the observer. Finally, the sample's lexical development exhibits a wide range of individual variation, with lexicons consisting of about 8 to 628 different words at 20 months of age.

No abstract

The findings suggest that mothers of children with DS adjust their communication to the developmental status of their child. Results are discussed in terms of the role of gesture in maternal communication and in the regulation of mother-child interaction.

The present four experiments examined the effects of pointing movements towards the target locations in a modified free recall task. Three factors were manipulated: the order of the move/no-move trials (blocked or mixed), the type of stimuli presentation (simultaneous or sequential) and the size of the to-be-recalled configurations (7-9 and 5-7 items). Results showed that pointing significantly decreased visuospatial performance both with a mixed and a blocked design. However, in the blocked condition the interference effect of pointing was load-dependent (being inversely related to array size) and occurred only when participants pointed to all stimuli in the first block. Post hoc analyses supported the conclusion that pointing movements interfered with the on-line development of appropriate retrieval strategies, like parsing the configurations into smaller chunks or creating global visual images.

The present study aims to identify individual differences in both rate and style of language acquisition in a sample of 15 Italianspeaking children, observed at 16 and 20 months of age. The nature as well as the stability of such differences over time were investigated, and the usefulness of different criteria for defining stylistic tendencies was evaluated. Fifteen middle-high class children and their mothers participated in the longitudinal study. The mother-child dyads were videotaped at home when the children were 16 and 20 month old. In addition to the observational data, at the same age points the mothers were administered a structured questionnaire designed to evaluate the level of the child's linguistic development.The results are in general consistent with previous findings showing a considerable variation in both rate and type of early vocabulary development. However, the finding that only a limited proportion of the Italian subjects used a referential/expressive style was largely unexpected. This suggests that the referential/ expressive distinction in early lexicon may be a characterization of stylistic variation more appropriate for English-speaking children than for children learning other languages. 0142-72~7/95/1502-0 20~ $5 (H) © Alpha Academic Fu st Language, 15 ( 1995), 203-218 Printed In England 203at NANYANG TECH UNIV LIBRARY on June 15, 2015 fla.sagepub.com Downloaded from