Pseudowords repetition in children with Down Syndrome

Abstract

Down syndrome (DS) is a genetic disorder which is represented by a variety of physical, sensory and cognitive disturbances. It has been described that children with Down syndrome show disturbances in repetition of pseudowords in Spanish. Nevertheless, most of these studies are in English. The aim of our research was to evaluate the efficiency of Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome with a pseudoword test where hearing, vocabulary and unintelligibility factors were controlled. The sampling consisted of 26 people distributed in 2 groups: a set of 13 children with Down syndrome and a set of 13 children with normal language development. Results corroborated the previous findings in other languages: Children with DS, in this research, showed a deficiency in words and pseudowords repetition, there were significant differences in simple pseudowords and there was not an effect of word length. In the conclusion there is an attempt to explain the findings and a suggestion of the efficiency of the use of a pseudoword test to measure phonological working memory in children with Down syndrome.