The acquisition of semantic features in children with Down’s sydrome

This study was designed to test the notion that children with Down's Syndrome develop their receptive language in the same order as normal children. E. Clark's Semantic Features Hypothesis which predicts a specific hierarchical acquisition of spatial adjectives was used to test this thesis. Two groups of preschool children, a group of children with Down's syndrome and a group of matched for chronological age were presented with forty tasks involving the selection of spatial adjectives. No significant differences were found in the performances of the two groups when taken as a whole. However, there were significant differences between the performances of the children in the younger group with Down's Syndrome and the other those of the other three groups of children.Education, Faculty ofEducational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department ofGraduat