Language development in children and adolescents with Down syndrome

This review of recent work on language development in children and adolescents with Down syndrome focuses on sentence structure, grammatical words, and vocabulary. Evidence is summarized for a specific expressive language impairment, over and above the cognitive delay associated with the syndrome. A profile of strengths (lexical comprehension) and deficits (lexical and sentence production) is identified. Acquisition of productive syntax is shown to be ongoing in adolescence, without evidence of limits to learning at the onset of adolescence or the advent of complex syntax. Additional difficulties in verb and grammatical morpheme acquisition are identified. Predictors of individual variation in performance and competing explanations of language deficit are discussed briefly. Interventions shown to increase communicative effectiveness are summarized. MRDD Research Reviews 1997;3:307–312.