RECEPTIVE AND EXPRESSIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS IN CHILDREN WITH DOWN SYNDROME

Research has shown that there is a distinct delay in the linguistic area, including semantics, affecting both receptive and expressive language skills in Down syndrome (DS). This paper presents the results of an experiment conducted in order to investigate expressive and receptive semantic skills in ten children with DS and ten children with typical development (TD). For this purpose, two tasks that measure expressive and receptive vocabulary, subscales of a test standardized for the Greek population, were given to both groups. Our results showed that both receptive and expressive semantic skills of children with DS were poorer than those of their typically developing counterparts and the performance in expressive semantics was correlated with that in receptive semantics in the DS group. However, when expressive semantics were compared to receptive semantics in DS they were found to be statistically significant poorer, delineating the deficits that exist in the expressive domain of language in DS.