Morphological And Phonological Processing Of Children With Down Syndrome

In this research article Miguel Lazaro, Elena Garayzabal, and Esther Moraleda discuss the differences on morphological and phonological processing between children with and without Down Syndrome. The purpose of this experiment was to deeply explore the linguistic process in normal growing children and children with Down Syndrome. The first experiment they conducted was to look at how new words are formed with prefixes and suffixes. Perfectly healthy children and a children with Down Syndrome were spilt up in to three groups. One group was based on mental age, the second based on the same vocabulary knowledge, and the third was the children with Down Syndrome. The researchers came up with 80 words, half of which were regular words and the other

If the child somewhat expressed knowledge of the word then they were given one point, and if no knowledge or no answer at all was given then they were given zero points This test showed the children with Down Syndrome performed much lower than the other two groups with recognizing the words given. The researchers also noted that the other two groups being split up by mental age and vocabulary knowledge made no difference. Their test results were ultimately the same. The experiment did not prove that morphological processing was the reason Down Syndrome children scored worse than normal children. For the second experiment the same children were tested about a month later. However, this time the half of the words used ended in a vowel and the other half ended in a consonant. Also, half of the words had high base frequencies while the other half had low base frequencies. In this test, the tester showed a child a picture and the child was to state what is was as best as he/she could. There was also a 10 second time limit but the child was unaware of the time limit thus eliminating pressure on the