Naming with words and gestures in children with Down Syndrome

Several researchers have shown a close relationship between gesture and language in typically developing children and in children with developmental disorders involving delayed or impaired linguistic abilities. Most of these studies reported that, when children are limited in cognitive, linguistic, met- alinguistic, and articulatory skills, they may compensate for some of these limitations with gestures (Capone & McGre- gor, 2004). Some researchers also highlighted that children with Down Syndrome (DS) show a preference for nonver- bal communication using more gestures with respect to typi- cally developing (TD) children (Stefanini, Caselli & Volterra, 2011). The present study investigates the lexical comprehen- sion and production abilities as well as the frequency and the form of gestural production in children with DS. In partic- ular, we are interested in the frequency of gesture produc- tion (deictic and representational) and the types of represen- tational gesture produced. Four gesture types were coded, including own body, size and shape, body-part-as object and imagined-object. Fourteen children with DS (34 months of developmental age, 54 months of chronological age) and a comparison group of 14 typically developing children (TD) (29 months of chronological age) matched for gender and de- velopmental age were assessed through the parent question- naire MB-CDI and a direct test of lexical comprehension and production (PiNG). Children with DS show a general weak- ness in lexical comprehension and production. As for the composition of the lexical repertoire, for both groups of chil- dren, nouns are understood and produced in higher percent- ages compared to predicates. Children with DS produce more representational gestures than TD children in the comprehen- sion task and above all with predicates; on the contrary, both groups of children exhibit the same number of gestures on the MB-CDI and in the lexical production task. Children with DS produced more unimodal gestural answers than the con- trol group. Children from both groups produced all four ges- ture types (own body 53%, size and shape 9%, body-part-as object 25 %, and imagined-object 14%). Chi-square analy- sis revealed no significant difference in the type of gesture produced between the two groups of children for both lex- ical categories. For both groups the distribution of gesture types reflects an item effect (eg. 100% of gesture produced for the pictures lion, kissing and washing were own body and 100% of the pictures produce for small and long were size and shape). For some item (e.g. comb, talking on the phone) chil- dren in both groups produced both types (body-part-as object and imagined-object) with similar frequency. These data on the types of representational gestures produced by the two groups show a similar conceptual representation in TD chil- dren and in children with DS despite a greater impairment of the spoken linguistic abilities in the letter. Future investiga- tions, are needed to confirm these preliminary results