The use of internal states words by bilingual children with Down syndrome: Longitudinal development, cross-linguistic variation, and register variation

Egbert, Jesse Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL] Larsson, Tove

Verbal communication is a major challenge for individuals with Down syndrome (DS) (Chapman et al., 1991). Children with DS tend to lag behind typically developing children (Martin et al., 2009). This lag is evident in the abilities of children with DS to produce internal states words, including lexical items used to express sensory perception (e.g. vision, hearing, smell), affect (e.g. affection, pleasure, sadness), and cognition (e.g. knowledge, thought, memory) (Beeghly & Cicchetti, 1997). This pattern of delayed development may be compounded by the acquisition of two languages in bilingual children with DS (Cleave et al., 2012). Building on previous research, we explore longitudinal development in bilingual children with DS in two languages (English and French) and two registers (oral narratives and conversation). Our research questions are: 1. To what extent does the use of internal states words by children with DS change over time? 2. To what extent does the use of internal states words by children with DS differ across languages (English and French)? 3. To what extent does the use of internal states words by children with DS vary across registers? Participants were English-French bilingual children with DS (n = 25) who produced elicited oral narratives and conversation with adult interlocutors at six-month intervals over approximately two years (see Cleave et al., 2012). We adopted a corpus-driven approach to analyzing internal states words in which we generated word frequency lists for the entire corpus and identified words that were potential candidates for internal states words by examining the words in context, coding individual words, and measuring inter-rater reliability. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons were conducted across time points, between languages, and between registers. Results reveal measurable effects of each of these variables. Our findings have implications for researchers and professionals in communication disorders and caregivers of children with DS.