Kids With Down Syndrome Learn Language Beyond Adolescence

Countering the claim among researchers that language learning in children with Down syndrome ends during the teen-age years, a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that individuals with Down syndrome can benefit from language intervention programs during adolescence.

Down syndrome is a developmental disability resulting from an extra copy of chromosome 21, and it affects about 5,000 newborns in the United States every year. A century ago, most children with this disability reached the age of only 9; today, they live well beyond their 50s.

Most children begin learning language skills, such as grammar and speaking, at rapid rates early in their lives. Children with Down syndrome, however, typically experience delays in language development, learning more slowly and at varying rates.

"There's a fanning out of skills in individuals that isn't seen in normally developing children," explains Robin Chapman, the study's primary investigator and a professor emeritus of communicative disorders at UW-Madison's Waisman Center, a facility dedicated to advancing the understanding of developmental disabilities. For example, vocabulary learning may progress much more rapidly than the learning of sentence structure, she says.

Though all these skills continue to improve throughout childhood, Chapman says that some researchers have claimed that the skills begin to plateau as a child with Down syndrome reaches adolescence. As a result of this claim, she notes, educational opportunities for teen-agers with this disability generally shift away from language learning.

Chapman's study, on other hand, shows that certain language skills continue to improve well beyond the teen-age years, suggesting that adolescents with Down syndrome should continue programs for language learning.

For the last six years, Chapman and her colleagues have charted the trajectory of learning skills and memory abilities in 31 individuals with Down syndrome who were ages 5-20 at the study's start. Through comprehension tests and storytelling tasks, they measured each person's ability to understand complex grammar (language comprehension) and his or her ability to speak it (language expression).