Language acquisition in Down Syndrome from embodied perspective: How body constrains language acquisition?

Parents of children with Down syndrome (DS) were asked to fill a questionnaire about how much their children understand and how well they use words. It was found that word acquisition is affected not only by word frequency, but also by whether a word is related to eventual misbalance of the body. The results are in favor of the hypothesis that the constraints of the human body may cause systematic variations of language acquisition as long as keeping the body balance is a typically difficult motor task for DS children. Additionally, we also found an asymmetry of the acquisition of the verbs and the nouns, depending on their frequency and relatedness to eventual misbalance of the body