Maternal control strategies, maternal language usage and children's language usage at two years.

The present study determined whether parenting style, defined by control strategies varying in power-assertion mediated the established relation between maternal language usage (grammar and semantics) and child language (grammar, semantics and pragmatics) during toddlerhood (n=60). Based upon their use of control strategies mothers were categorized into continuum-of-control groups (i.e., high guidance (HG), high control (HC) or high negative control (HNC)). Mothers in the high negative control group, who characteristically used high levels of prohibitions and commands, had children who performed relatively poorly overall on the language measures (i.e., MLU, number of bound morphemes, number of different words and use of language functions). In contrast, children of mothers in the HG and HC groups exhibited more advanced language usage overall. The relation between maternal and child language usage was mediated by parenting style for child pragmatics and partially for child grammar.

Sampling context affects MLU in the language of adolescents with Down syndrome.

PURPOSE: The authors describe the procedures used to explain an unexpected finding that adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) had a lower mean length of utterance (MLU) than typically developing (TD) children in interviews without picture support, but not in narratives supported by wordless picture books. They hypothesize that the picture support of the narrative context increased the MLU for the group with DS alone. METHOD: Adolescents with DS (n = 14) and TD children (n = 14) matched for receptive syntax narrated picture storybooks and participated in interviews. Transcription reliability, intelligibility/fluency, grammatical errors, discourse and sampling contexts, and discourse characteristics were examined for their effects on MLU. RESULTS: The DS group showed a greater responsiveness to adult questions than the TD group; an alternate MLU without yes/no responses showed the same interaction of group and context as the original finding. An additional comparison of MLUs, obtained from narratives present in the interview and narratives elicited using picture books, showed that picture support in narrative increased MLUs only for the group with DS. CONCLUSION: Picture support, rather than narrative context alone, increased MLUs for the group with DS. Clinical use of narratives and picture support in assessment and intervention with individuals with DS is discussed.

Narrative content as described by individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing children.

Narratives of the wordless picture story, Frog, Where Are You?, by 33 individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing children (33 matched for mental age, 33 for syntax comprehension, 33 for mean length of utterance) were analyzed for expression of plot line, story theme, and the protagonists' misadventures in the story. Despite their restricted expressive syntax and vocabulary, the group with Down syndrome expressed more plot line and thematic content and more of one of the protagonists' misadventures than the MLU controls; they most resembled the syntax comprehension control participants. We conclude that the group with Down syndrome had a conceptual understanding of the picture story similar to that of the TACL-R group and a strategy for expressing that understanding despite expressive lexical and syntactic limitations; this resulted in the expression of more narrative content than formal measures of expressive language would predict. We propose that the higher syntactic comprehension skills of the group with Down syndrome, combined with their experience with story content (listening to stories), may have contributed to their developing higher-level story schemas than would be expected given their MLUs.