Referential communication abilities in children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome

Abstract

Purpose: This study describes the performance on a perspective- and role-taking task in 27 children, ages 6–13 years, with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS). A cross-cultural design comparing Dutch- and English-speaking children with 22q11.2DS explored the possibility of cultural differences.

Method: Chronologically age-matched and younger typically developing (TD) children matched for receptive vocabulary served as control groups to identify challenges in referential communication.

Results: The utterances of children with 22q11.2DS were characterised as short and simple in lexical and grammatical terms. However, from a language use perspective, their utterances were verbose, ambiguous and irrelevant given the pictured scenes. They tended to elaborate on visual details and conveyed off-topic, extraneous information when participating in a barrier-game procedure. Both types of aberrant utterances forced a listener to consistently infer the intended message. Moreover, children with 22q11.2DS demonstrated difficulty selecting correct speech acts in accordance with contextual cues during a role-taking task.

Conclusion: Both English- and Dutch-speaking children with 22q11.2DS showed impoverished information transfer and an increased number of elaborations, suggesting a cross-cultural syndrome-specific feature.

Keywords:

• Referential communication
• 22q11.2 deletion syndrome
• cross-cultural

Acknowledgement

The authors want to thank all participating children and families and speech and language pathologists and teachers of several schools who assisted with recruitment. The authors gratefully acknowledge assistance provided by Claudette Bañares, Mary Gochuico, Nore Wijns, and Ine Gomand, for analysis of samples for inter-rater reliability. The authors would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Elaine Zackai, Prof. Dr. Donna McDonald-McGinn, and Dr. Oksana Jackson, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for their assistance with recruitment of English-speaking children.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Funding

This research was funded by a grant awarded by the foundation Marguerite-Marie Delacroix and a KU Leuven Junior Mobility grant.