Penke Martina
Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation, University of Cologne, Germany.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2018 Sep 19;61(9):2217-2234. doi: 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-17-0241.
The study aims to explore whether finite verbal morphology is affected in children/adolescents with Down syndrome (DS), whether observed deficits in this domain are indicative of a delayed or deviant development, and whether they are due to phonetic/phonological problems or deficits in phonological short-term memory.
An elicitation task on subject-verb agreement, a picture-naming task targeting stem-final consonants that also express verbal agreement, a nonword repetition task, and a test on grammar comprehension were conducted with 2 groups of monolingual German children: 32 children/adolescents with DS (chronological age M = 11;01 [years;months]) and a group of 16 typically developing children (chronological age M = 4;00) matched on nonverbal mental age.
Analyses reveal that a substantial number of children/adolescents with DS are impaired in marking verbal agreement and fail to reach an acquisition criterion. The production of word-final consonants succeeds, however, when these consonants do not express verbal agreement. Performance with verbal agreement and nonword repetition are related.
Data indicate that a substantial number of children/adolescents with DS display a deficit in verbal agreement inflection that cannot be attributed to phonetic/phonological problems. The influence of phonological short-term memory on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement has to be further explored.
本研究旨在探讨唐氏综合征（DS）儿童/青少年的有限动词形态是否受到影响，该领域观察到的缺陷是否表明发育延迟或异常，以及这些缺陷是由于语音/音系问题还是语音短期记忆缺陷所致。
对两组单语德国儿童进行了一项关于主谓一致的引出任务、一项针对也表达动词一致的词尾辅音的图片命名任务、一项非词重复任务以及一项语法理解测试：32名患有DS的儿童/青少年（实际年龄M = 11;01[岁;月]）和一组16名发育正常的儿童（实际年龄M = 4;00），两组在非语言心理年龄上相匹配。
分析表明，大量患有DS的儿童/青少年在标记动词一致方面存在障碍，未达到习得标准。然而，当词尾辅音不表达动词一致时，词尾辅音的发音是成功的。动词一致表现与非词重复表现相关。
数据表明，大量患有DS的儿童/青少年在动词一致屈折变化方面存在缺陷，这不能归因于语音/音系问题。语音短期记忆对主谓一致习得的影响有待进一步探索。
