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This study investigated the development of language and communication in children with Down syndrome (DS). More specifically, the aim was to examine the relations among verbal comprehension, verbal production, and gesture production in the very early stages of development. Forty children (age range: 10-49 months) with DS and 40 children with normal development (age range: 8-17 months) participated in this study. Children with DS came from two Italian health centers. The communicative and linguistic development of children with DS was measured by administering the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. The children with DS were severely delayed when compared with normally developing children in reaching the developmental stages. In such children a dissociation emerged between verbal comprehension and production, in favor of comprehension, whereas a synchronous development was found between vocal lexical comprehension and gestural production. The individual differences previously reported in these children are also evident in all domains examined. There were no significant differences between children with DS and typically developing controls matched for lexical comprehension on verbal production. However the two groups differed significantly in gestural development, suggesting a "gesture advantage" in children with DS compared with controls matched for word comprehension. Some possible reasons for this dissociative profile are discussed.
KEY WORDS: gestures, words, development, Down syndrome
Studies of language abilities in children with Down syndrome (DS) report general delays in language development, together with specific dissociations among different linguistic domains (i.e., comprehension vs. production) or subdomains (e.g., lexicon vs. morphosyntax) (Cardoso-Martins, Mervis, & Mervis, 1985; Caselli, Marchetti, & Vicari, 1994; Chapman, 1995; Fowler, 1990; Miller, 1992). These linguistic problems become increasingly evident as development progresses. For example, Fowler (1990) showed that, in the early stages, no differences are observed in the syntactic and semantic skills of children with DS and typically developing children of comparable mental age. However, older children with DS do show a deficit in morphosyntactic and phonological areas (i.e., below mental age), with lexical abilities relatively preserved (e.g., at mental age). Chapman (1995) noted that some specific aspects of morphosyntax are generally more delayed than we would expect given mean length of utterance (MLU). Rondal (1993) demonstrated that subjects with DS tend to use simple sentences in which function words (articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc.)...