The Interplay of Morphosyntax and Verbal and Nonverbal Short-Term Memory in Children and Adolescents with Down Syndrome

Down syndrome (DS) is associated with persistent language impairments that extend beyond early childhood, yet evidence from agglutinative languages remains limited. While morphosyntactic weaknesses have been well-documented in Indo-European languages, less is known about how such difficulties are manifested in Turkish, a language in which grammatical relations are primarily marked through morphology. In addition, short-term memory (STM) limitations, particularly in verbal domains, are characteristic of DS and may contribute to language outcomes. This study examined the interaction between morphosyntax and STM in Turkish-speaking children and adolescents with DS. A cross-sectional observational design was employed, including 12 monolingual Turkish-speaking participants with DS (aged 6;7–15;11) and 10 TD peers matched on nonverbal mental age. Participants completed standardized assessments of syntax and morphology, spontaneous language sampling, and STM tasks assessing verbal and visual memory. Children with DS performed significantly below controls on syntactic comprehension and production as well as morphological measures, with larger effects observed for syntax. Noun morphology was less accurate than verb morphology, likely reflecting increased morphophonological complexity. Regression analyses indicated that auditory digit span predicted sentence comprehension, whereas nonword repetition predicted morphological production indexed by mean length of utterance in morphemes. Substantial inter-individual variability was observed within the DS group. These findings suggest that morphosyntactic outcomes in Turkish-speaking children with DS are closely linked to verbal STM capacities and vary considerably across individuals, underscoring the importance of integrated assessment and individualized intervention planning. Future research with larger samples is warranted to confirm and extend these preliminary findings. Findings should be interpreted cautiously due to the limited sample size and are presented as preliminary descriptive evidence. This study provides initial data on Turkish-speaking individuals with Down syndrome.