Reading skills and phonological awareness acquisition in Down syndrome.
Down syndrome learners need direct, heavy practice on phonological awareness and non-word reading—those pieces do not grow on their own.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lecavalier et al. (2006) compared kids with Down syndrome to reading-age peers without disabilities.
They gave both groups tasks that tested fake-word reading and phonological awareness.
The design was quasi-experimental: no random assignment, just matched groups.
What they found
The Down syndrome group scored lower on reading made-up words and on phonological awareness.
These two skills were specific weak spots, even when overall reading age was similar.
How this fits with other research
Chou et al. (2010) and Scalzo et al. (2015) looked at kids with mild intellectual disability, not Down syndrome.
Both found that strong phonological awareness predicts later reading success—an apparent contradiction.
The difference is population: mild-ID kids show a pathway; Down syndrome kids hit a wall.
Foti et al. (2015) meta-analysis pulls many studies together and confirms the wall exists across disabilities.
Why it matters
If you teach reading to learners with Down syndrome, drill phonological awareness and non-word decoding early and often.
Do not assume these skills will grow naturally from sight-word work.
Use clear, repeated sound-play and blending games before moving to harder text.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Although reading abilities play a fundamental role in the acquisition of personal autonomy, up until now studies investigating these abilities in Down syndrome (DS) are aimed at defining educational or rehabilitation acquisition. However, studies describing the relationship between reading and phonological awareness in individuals with DS by comparing them to typically developing children often report contradictory results. The aim of this study is to explore reading and phonological awareness skills in a group of participants with DS. METHODS: We administered reading and phonological processing ability tests to 17 DS individuals and to 17 reading-age-matched typically developing children. RESULTS: Concerning reading abilities, participants with DS were impaired on non-word reading and on interpreting accuracy of non-homographic homophones. Their passage comprehension was also limited. Comparable ability was reported in the two groups on irregular word reading and passage reading tasks. Regarding phonological awareness ability, individuals with DS showed lower performances on several tasks, such as rhyming, deletion and syllable segmentation. CONCLUSIONS: People with DS show particular failure on non-word reading, a task where correct decoding is only partially influenced by lexical access or semantic context. Correct non-word reading mainly requires the use of the grapheme-phoneme conversion process. This process is based on the efficiency of phonological awareness abilities, which are partly impaired in people with DS. The rehabilitative implications of these findings are discussed.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2006 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2006.00793.x