Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
Int J Speech Lang Pathol. 2021 Jun;23(3):286-294. doi: 10.1080/17549507.2020.1804618. Epub 2020 Sep 16.
Children with Down Syndrome (DS) show difficulties in language development, in both basic and complex abilities, as narratives. Less is known about the prosodic competence in DS, but the few available studies highlighted the presence of some deficits. Considering the importance of narratives and prosody in communication, the main aim of this study is to investigate these two competencies in participants with DS.
13 children with DS participated (Mean age: 13;04, years; months). Their narrative and prosodic abilities, collected through a storytelling task, were compared with those of two control groups of typically developing (TD) children, one matched for nonverbal mental age (MA, Mean age: 5;03) and the other matched for the mean length of utterance (MLU, Mean age: 5;05). For the narrative competence, we considered both the macrostructural (i.e. quantity of information and story structure) and the microstructural level (i.e. verbal productivity, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity). For the prosodic competence, we took into account acoustic measures linked to intonation (i.e. mean fundamental frequency (f0), pitch range, final speech profile, and speed of speech).
The results of the Mann-Whitney test showed that participants with DS produced stories comparable to those of TD children in nearly all the variables considered, except for the syntactic complexity when compared with children of the same MA. Differences between participants with DS and TD children were found in the f0 and the final pitch profile used.
Considering the small size of the samples, these preliminary results should be taken with caution. Nonetheless, this study confirms the presence of difficulties in the prosody of speech and in the syntactic competence of children with DS. These difficulties could have consequences on the possibility to communicate efficiently and should be taken into account in rehabilitation programmes.
唐氏综合征（DS）患儿在语言发展方面存在困难，包括基本和复杂能力，如叙事能力。关于 DS 患者的韵律能力知之甚少，但少数可用的研究强调了存在一些缺陷。考虑到叙事和韵律在交流中的重要性，本研究的主要目的是调查 DS 患者的这两种能力。
共有 13 名 DS 患儿参与（平均年龄：13 岁；04 个月）。通过讲故事任务收集他们的叙事和韵律能力，并与两个对照组进行比较，一个对照组按非言语智力年龄（MA）匹配（平均年龄：5 岁；03 个月），另一个对照组按平均话语长度（MLU）匹配（平均年龄：5 岁；05 个月）。对于叙事能力，我们同时考虑了宏观结构（即信息量和故事结构）和微观结构水平（即言语产出、词汇多样性、句法复杂性）。对于韵律能力，我们考虑了与语调相关的声学测量（即平均基频（f0）、音高范围、最终语音轮廓和语速）。
曼-惠特尼检验结果表明，与 MA 相同的 TD 儿童相比，DS 患儿在几乎所有考虑的变量中都能产生与 TD 儿童相当的故事，但在句法复杂性方面与 TD 儿童相比存在差异。DS 患儿与 TD 儿童之间在 f0 和使用的最终音高轮廓方面存在差异。
考虑到样本量较小，这些初步结果应谨慎对待。尽管如此，本研究证实了 DS 儿童在言语韵律和句法能力方面存在困难。这些困难可能会对有效沟通的可能性产生影响，因此应该在康复计划中加以考虑。
