The Composition of Early Vocabulary in Spanish Children With Down Syndrome and Their Peers With Typical Development

Abstract

Purpose: There are very few studies, and at present none in Spanish, on vocabulary composition in children with Down syndrome (DS). Nor has the topic been widely assessed in Spanish-speaking children with typical development (TD). This study analyzed the composition of early vocabularies in a large sample of Spanish-speaking children with DS and compared it with that of children with TD.

Method: We studied 108 children with DS and 108 children with TD with mental ages between 8 and 29 months, matched for size of productive vocabulary and gender. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1993, 2007), adapted to the language development profile of children with DS, were used. The categories examined were nouns, predicates, closed-class words, and social words.

Results: The performance of children with DS was similar to that of children with TD with the same vocabulary size. The only significant difference was the larger production of nouns by children with DS. The trends of development in the different classes of words were also similar.

Conclusions: The strategies used by children with DS to learn vocabulary may be similar to those used by children with TD in the first stages of language learning.