Nouns and predicates comprehension and production in children with Down syndrome.
Preschoolers with Down syndrome know more nouns than verbs, but both are behind—gesture is their backup system.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested the preschoolers with Down syndrome. They matched each child to a typically developing toddler of the same developmental age.
Kids named pictures and pointed to the right image when they heard a word. The words were either nouns (ball, dog) or predicates (eat, jump).
The test counted correct words and gestures. Gestures counted when a child pantomimed the action instead of saying it.
What they found
Children with Down syndrome knew and said fewer words than their matched peers. The gap was bigger for predicates (verbs and adjectives) than for nouns.
When words failed, the kids used their hands. They gestured more often, especially for actions they could not name.
Even with gestures, the Down syndrome group still lagged behind. The noun advantage they showed was not enough to close the overall gap.
How this fits with other research
Johnston et al. (1997) once reported that preschoolers with Down syndrome had "similar or better" pragmatic skills than peers. That sounds opposite to Laugeson et al. (2014), but the 1997 study matched kids by language comprehension, not developmental age. When you match by comprehension, the bar is lower, so the kids look stronger.
Neitzel (2024) followed the same noun-verb thread into grade school. She found that the number of different verbs a child used in a story was the best predictor of narrative quality. The preschool verb gap A et al. saw is still shaping school-age storytelling ten years later.
Newell et al. (2025) showed the story doesn’t get better by itself. Their Chilean sample still struggled with narrative cohesion. Together, the three papers trace one line: early verb weakness → later sparse stories → poor cohesion.
Why it matters
If you work with preschoolers who have Down syndrome, target verbs early and hard. Use real actions, video clips, and gesture-plus-word drills. Track verb diversity, not just total vocabulary. When a child pantomimes, shape that gesture into a spoken word. Closing the verb gap now may prevent the narrative gaps Isabel and Victoria see later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Our study investigated the lexical comprehension and production abilities as well as gestural production taking into account different lexical categories, namely nouns and predicates. Fourteen children with DS (34 months of developmental age) and a comparison group of 14 typically developing children (TD) matched for gender and developmental age were assessed through a test of lexical comprehension and production (PiNG) and the Italian MB-CDI. Children with DS showed a general weakness in lexical comprehension and production that appeared more evident when the lexicon was assessed through a structured test such as the PiNG that requires general cognitive skills that are impaired in children with DS. As for the composition of the lexical repertoire, for both groups of children, nouns are understood and produced in higher percentages compared to predicates. Children with DS produced more representational gestures than TD children in the comprehension tasks and above all with predicates; on the contrary, both groups of children exhibited the same number of gestures on the MB-CDI and during the subtests of PiNG production. Children with DS produced more unimodal gestural answers than the control group. Theoretical implications of these results are discussed.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.01.023