Communication about emotions during storybook reading: Effects of an instruction programme for children with Down syndrome

Abstract

Purpose: Children with Down syndrome often have more restricted emotion expression and recognition skills than their peers who are developing typically, and potentially fewer opportunities to learn these skills. This study investigated the effect of the Strategies for Talking about Emotions as PartnerS (STEPS) programme on parents’ provision of opportunities for emotion communication using visual communication supports.

Method: The study used a single-subject multiple-baseline across participants design with three parent–child dyads. Shared book reading was used as the context for parent instruction and data collection.

Result: Parents increased their use of the emotion communication strategies immediately following an instructional session, and continued to use them for the remaining phases of the study. In turn, the children participated more actively in the discussion by making comments about emotions when parents provided more opportunities.

Conclusion: The STEPS instructional programme is effective for improving parents’ provision of opportunities for discussing emotions during storybook reading with children who have Down syndrome. All parents indicated that they would use the strategy during future reading activities. This paper discusses the results of the study and directions for future research.

Keywords:

• augmentative and alternative communication
• emotion
• parent education

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the participants. We also gratefully acknowledge assistance provided by Veronica Cristiano, Maria Fabrizio, Shannon Kelly, Tyler Lawson, Anthony Oliveti and Stephanie Weitz with data collection and analysis. This research project is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education under grant number H325D110008. Parts of this project were presented at the ASHA Convention (2015).

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2017.1356376.