Teaching prereading skills to disabled children.

A Swedish survey suggests that less than 10% of children with Down's syndrome between 7 and 10 years of age are able to read a simple text. Children with Down's syndrome in a programme for early language intervention show clear progress in reading ability. The programme focuses on general language development, auditory and visual perception, and fine-motor ability. Prereading skills are stimulated in a systematic way such as identifying and discriminating sound-patterns at the level of the word, the syllable and the segments, and children are helped to categorize forms, to discriminate and understand pictures, to recognize the direction of reading, and to realize the grapheme-phoneme correspondence.