A story description task in children with Down's syndrome: lexical and morphosyntactic abilities.
Story retell uncovers grammar and pragmatics gaps in Down syndrome even when vocabulary looks fine.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Fabbretti et al. (1997) asked kids with Down syndrome to tell a story from a wordless picture book. They compared the stories to those of kids matched for sentence length. The team counted vocabulary variety and grammar errors.
The goal was to see if story retell could spot hidden language problems.
What they found
The Down syndrome group used as many different words as their peers. Yet they left out small grammar bits like past-tense endings. They also stayed on the same topic less often.
Vocabulary looked fine, but grammar and pragmatics slipped.
How this fits with other research
Newell et al. (2025) repeated the same task 28 years later and got the same result: weaker story cohesion in Chilean kids with Down syndrome. The flaw is real and stable across cultures.
Neitzel (2024) looked deeper and found verb variety drives overall story quality. If you boost verbs, the whole tale improves.
Johnston et al. (1997) seems to disagree: parents of preschoolers with Down syndrome rated their kids' pragmatics as okay. The gap likely appears as tasks get harder with age, not because the earlier study was wrong.
Why it matters
Story retell is a quick screen you can run in 10 minutes. It shows you where to focus: verbs and grammar endings, not just word count. Pair the task with visual supports or explicit cohesion prompts to turn assessment into treatment.
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02At a glance
03Original 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.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1997 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1997.tb00693.x