19. Pragmatic competence in Down syndrome

Abstract

states to the minds of others (i.e. theory of mind). One mental state in particularcommunicative intentions -is integral to communication between speakers and hearers. The result will be a wide-ranging account of some of the pragmatic disorders which will be examined in detail in later chapters. Pragmatic breakdown in the communication cycleBy any standard, human communication is a remarkable achievement. A complex array of sensorimotor, linguistic and cognitive skills must come together in seamless unison to make this achievement possible. For the most part, these skills work well and the result is an effortless exchange of linguistic utterances between speakers and hearers. However, when one or more of these skills is disrupted or does not develop along normal lines, the effect can be a quite devastating loss of one of our most important capacities. In this section, the different stages in the human communication cycle will be examined from a pragmatic perspective. The aim will be to identify specific points in this cycle where disruption of pragmatic language skills has an adverse effect on one's capacity to communicate. A further aim of this examination will be to introduce the many and varied ways in which pragmatics is disrupted in children and adults with clinical disorders in advance of a detailed examination of some of these disorders in subsequent chapters. We begin with a brief overview of the eight stages or phases that are integral to human communication and are depicted in Figure 1.

Word type and modality in the emerging expressive vocabularies of preschool children with Down syndrome

“…Although studies to this point have produced broadly similar results in terms of word types in children both TD and those with DS, it is important also to explore children's modality preferences in their early expressive vocabularies given the widely used practice of encouraging children with DS to use visual expression, including signed vocabulary, as a support for emerging spoken language (Abbeduto et al, 2007;Caselli et al, 1998;Foster-Cohen & van Bysterveldt, 2020;Galeote et al, 2011Galeote et al, , 2008Vandereet et al, 2011;Romano et al, 2020;Zampini & D'Odorico, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2013. Considering gestures and signs as valid lexical representations allows for the exploration of expressive vocabulary size across modalities and of the role of modality in vocabulary composition (Layton & Savino, 1990).…”