Text comprehension in Down syndrome: The role of lower and higher level abilities

Abstract

The contribution of lower level linguistic abilities (study 1) and a higher level capacity, namely the use of context, (study 2), on text comprehension was studied. Participants were 16 individuals with Down syndrome aged between aged between 8 years 11 months and 16 years 10 months, and 16 children with typical development, aged between 5 years 11 months and 7 years 3 months, matched for the level of text comprehension. In study 1 the two groups were compared for receptive vocabulary and sentence comprehension: both of them were shown to play a role in text comprehension in Down syndrome. Since participants with Down syndrome had very low scores in sentence comprehension, study 2 tested the hypothesis that when sentences were presented within a brief context, individuals with Down syndrome would perform better. This hypothesis was confirmed and it was shown that contextual facilitation was closely related to text comprehension skills.

• Text comprehension
• sentence comprehension
• receptive vocabulary
• Down syndrome
• contextual facilitation
• higher level abilities
• lower level abilities

Notes

Notes

1. A size effect with a value greater than 0.8 is considered high (cf. Cohen, 1988).

2. Since some studies reported significant relationships between non‐verbal abilities and verbal abilities involved in literacy (see Laws and Gunn, 2002), we carried out the same analyses, entering age and CPM before entering the two linguistic variables. The total variance explained by the model was 58.4%. Age and CPM did not explain significant variance in the model (R² = .120).

3. This analysis was also run including the role played by age and non‐verbal abilities (CPM): They explained 8.4% of variance, which was a non‐significant contribution, to the total amount of variance, which was 50.6%.