-This study compares the procedural counting ability (independently and with parental support) and conceptual understanding of cardinality of a group of children with Down syndrome and a group of typically developing children, matched for non-verbal mental age. Participants were 23 children with Down syndrome (chronological age range: 3.5 -7 years; mental age range: 2.5 -4 years) and 20 typically developing children (chronological age range: 2 -4 years; mental age range: 2.5 -4 years), and their main caregiver. The children were asked to count sets of toys (assessing procedural counting skills) and to give sets of toys (assessing understanding of cardinality), with set sizes between 2 and 18 items. The counting task was performed in two conditions, with and without parental support. The children were also asked to say the count word sequence aloud, to assess sequence production independent from object counting. The typically developing children produced signifi cantly more number words altogether, longer standard number sequences and could count larger sets than the children with Down syndrome. Support from an adult improved performance on the count task signifi cantly for both groups of children, and there was no signifi cant difference between the groups in the degree of improvement, i.e. the zone of proximal development. No signifi cant differences were found between the frequency of children (approximately one third) in each group who used counting to solve the give task, indicating an understanding of cardinality.
The paper illustrates a practice, which we have called ‘marking’, observed in play interactions between parents and children with Down syndrome (DS) aged 3–8 years. Markings are minimal turns that rely on prosody, embodied resources and indexicality to foreground events within an ongoing activity and convey a stance toward them. Markings can be both retrospective and prospective (i.e. referring to a just-occurred or an incipient event). As first pair parts, they are open action bids that prompt recipients to display their co-orientation towards the referent. Responses from parents (i.e. second markings) can take the form of repeats or expansions; after prospective marking the recipient can also add support to the incipient activity the child has marked. We discuss marking as the core constituent of a larger family of actions for ‘sharing noteworthiness’, but also as a designedly undetermined action bid with specific conversational uses for children and adults alike.
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