The benefit of orthographic support for oral vocabulary learning in children with Down syndrome

Abstract

Copyright - Cambridge University PressChildren with Down syndrome typically have weaknesses in oral language, but it has been suggested that this domain may benefit from learning to read. Amongst oral language skills, vocabulary is a relative strength, although there is some evidence of difficulties in learning the phonological form of spoken words. This study investigated the effect of orthographic support on spoken word learning with seventeen children with Down syndrome aged seven to sixteen years and twenty-seven typically developing children aged five to seven years matched for reading ability. Ten spoken nonwords were paired with novel pictures; for half the nonwords the written form was also present. The spoken word learning of both groups did not differ and benefited to the same extent from the presence of the written word. This suggests that compared to reading-matched typically developing children, children with Down syndrome are not specifically impaired in phonological learning and benefit equally from orthographic support. Copyright ?? 2012 Cambridge University Press

Orthography Facilitates Vocabulary Learning for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)

“…In the remainder of this Does orthography support oral vocabulary learning for children with ASD? Vocabulary learning is facilitated by the presence of orthography for TD children (Reitsma, 1983;Ricketts et al, 2009;Rosenthal & Ehri, 2008) and children with Down syndrome (Mengoni et al, 2013). The present study extends these findings by demonstrating for the first time that this is also the case for children with ASD who had developed proficient phonological decoding and singleword reading skills.…”

“…Indeed, previous research has demonstrated that regular words are learned more readily than irregular words (Wang, Castles, & Nickels, 2012), though orthography is most beneficial for learning new words with irregular spellings (Ricketts et al, 2009, but see Rastle, McCormick, Bayliss, & Davis, 2011. We did not control for regularity in the present study; to provide such a control would require use of nonword stimuli, as employed by Ricketts et al (2009) and Mengoni et al (2013). Given the educational challenges that children with ASD face, we felt it would be more beneficial to see whether we could support learning of words that had scholastic relevance.…”

“…Mengoni et al (2013) attempted to distinguish these two possibilities by including unfamiliar symbols in the "OA" condition and found that, indeed, only the presence of meaningful orthography facilitated vocabulary learning. We chose not to include such a control in our experiment.…”

“…Like children with ASD, individuals with Down syndrome (DS) have decoding skills that are superior to text comprehension (Snowling, Nash, & Henderson, 2008). Mengoni, Nash, and Hulme (2013) taught 17 children with DS and 27 younger TD children matched for word reading ability 10 nonwords, five with the orthography present and five with orthography replaced by three randomly selected Greek or Cyrillic letters. The participants were exposed to each stimulus 12 times, and learning was assessed 10-15 min after training.…”

Longitudinal relationships between language and verbal short-term memory skills in children with Down syndrome

“…Finally, on a more specific level, the finding of longitudinal stability in language and verbal short-term memory skills in children with Down syndrome suggests that intervention to improve language learning in these children may be particularly important from an early age. There is evidence that early high-frequency language intervention for children with Down syndrome can result in significant gains in vocabulary (Yoder, Woynaroski, Fey, & Warren, 2014), and evidence also suggests that learning to read may help to promote their language development (Buckley & Bird, 1993;Burgoyne et al, 2012;Mengoni, Nash, & Hulme, 2013;Oelwein, 1995). However, although such approaches may appear to be promising, few experimental language training studies including children with Down syndrome exist, and the transfer effect to items not trained remains unclear.…”