ABSTRACT
A story description task was used to elicit short stories by 10 Italian children and adolescents with Down's syndrome and 10 normal children matched on mean length of utterance (MLU). Data analysis focused on a subset of lexical, morphological and syntactic aspects of language use. The results show that the subjects with Down's syndrome and their normal matches use a similar lexical repertoire. However, the two groups differ with respect to omissions of free morphemes, and some aspects of syntactic and pragmatic abilities. These data on Italian subjects corroborate and extend previous findings on other languages: despite an extensive repertoire of lexical and grammatical items, subjects with Down's syndrome seem unable to use such elements appropriately and consistently across contexts.
Subject(s)
Down Syndrome , Language , Verbal Behavior , Adolescent , Child , Female , Humans , Intellectual Disability , MaleSubject(s)
Language Development , Language , Child , Child Language , Child, Preschool , Female , Humans , Infant , Italy , Male , Verbal LearningABSTRACT
This study explores the spontaneous acquisition of Italian inflectional morphology by three children (age range I;4-3;O). Longitudinal, free speech samples are examined, focusing on the development of the morphological paradigms of Italian verbs, pronouns and articles. Data analysis is conducted using criteria appropriate to allow reliable cross-linguistic comparisons with data from English. By this means we evaluate the plausibility of a nativist, parameter-setting account of language development in Italian and English, as recently proposed for these two languages. Results show that the general developmental patterns observed in Italian are not significantly different from those found in English. These findings are not consistent with current interpretations of parameter-setting accounts of language development. Alternative explanatory models are discussed.
