Sentence imitation by adolescents and young adults with Down's syndrome and other intellectual disabilities.
Sentence imitation keeps showing lower expressive skill in Down syndrome than in same-IQ peers, driven by memory and grammar limits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tracked the same teens and young adults with Down syndrome for three years.
Each year they asked each person to repeat sentences of different lengths and grammar.
They compared the scores to peers who had similar IQs but other disabilities.
What they found
The Down syndrome group always scored lower on repeating sentences.
The gap stayed the same every year, even as both groups got older.
Memory and grammar skills, not just hearing, drove the poor scores.
How this fits with other research
Robinson et al. (2011) pooled many studies and saw the same pattern: Down syndrome means weak verbal memory and weak language.
Saville et al. (2002) dug deeper and found the memory limit comes from slow word finding, not from how fast kids can talk.
Winburn et al. (2014) showed you can help by adding pictures and grouping words, but the boost is smaller than in typical kids.
Why it matters
When you test expressive language, know that sentence imitation will likely under-score clients with Down syndrome.
Use short, related words and show visual cues during trials.
Track memory skills along with grammar; both need goals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Sentence imitation performance was evaluated longitudinally in 26 adolescents and young adults with Down's syndrome (DS), and 26 age- and IQ-matched non-DS individuals with other causes of intellectual disability (ID). In each of three annual assessments, the DS group began sentence repetitions more slowly and imitated sentences less accurately than the ID group. DS sentence repetition accuracy was equivalent to the ID group only for two-word sentences and was poorer for every other sentence length. Comparisons of sentence imitation and auditory digit span scores suggested that only ID subjects benefitted from the additional meaning and structure provided by sentences. Correlational analyses performed between each year's sentence imitation score and a set of language, memory and hearing measures revealed that sentence imitation was related to grammatical comprehension, auditory short-term memory and IQ in both groups, and to expressive language ability, speed of spoken word processing, speech discrimination and acoustic reflexes in the DS group only. A significant relationship between sentence imitation and middle-ear functioning was further supported by a categorical analysis in which DS subjects with bilateral abnormal tympanograms tended to perform more poorly on sentence imitation tasks than DS subjects with at least one normal tympanogram. It was concluded that sentence imitation is a task that is sensitive to the auditory-perceptual, cognitive and expressive difficulties evidenced by individuals with DS.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1995 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1995.tb00504.x