Reading interventions for children with Down syndrome

Kelly Burgoyne

Though many individuals with Down syndrome are now able to achieve useful levels of literacy skills, it is still not clear how best to support the development of reading skills with this group. Research with typically developing children has identified successful methods of teaching reading, and recent work has begun to evaluate these methods for individuals with Down syndrome. The aim of this paper is to review this work, and to highlight areas in need of further research.


Exceptional writing in a young adult with Down syndrome

Stephanie Markey, and Pau-San Hoh

Until recently, there have been few studies of language development in the Down syndrome population. Within the past fifteen years, studies have been done concerning the writing abilities of people with Down syndrome. None of these studies, however, have focused on a high functioning person with Down syndrome. This study demonstrates the ability of someone with Down syndrome to make incredible language achievements. I used my sister, Rose, as the subject of my study. Rose was born five years before me; at birth she was diagnosed with Down syndrome. I analysed 62 of Rose's journal entries, dating from 1998 to 2005. From these journals, I was able to see the language accomplishments that she has made. These include metalinguistic awareness, correct sentence structure, correct use of parallelism, correct use of temporal phrases, correct use of conditional phrases, and an interesting narrative structure and writing persona. Rose has achieved incredible language accomplishments. This is due in part to the early intervention programme she completed, as well as her home atmosphere. There, she was given intensive treatment, and she was treated as a capable person, not a disabled individual.


Autoimmune hepatitis in Down syndrome

Kim-Doan Nguyen, Scott Duong, Farrah Lazare, Maria Triantafyllopoulou, Ian Leibowitz, J Decker Butzner, Rajeev Nagpal, and William Treem

We sought to determine the clinical features of autoimmune hepatitis in children with Down syndrome. After an inquiry on the PEDS GI Board, a questionnaire was sent to interested colleagues. Seven patients with autoimmune hepatitis and Down syndrome were reported. The median age at diagnosis was 10 yrs, range 3-15 yrs. All seven were ANA+ and SMA+; none were anti-LKM1+. Initially, three were treated with corticosteroids alone, three with corticosteroids and azathioprine (AZA), and one with cyclosporine alone. Three are currently on AZA alone; two remain on corticosteroids. No patients underwent liver transplant. There were two deaths. We concluded that autoimmune hepatitis is another autoimmune disease to consider in the evaluation of children with Down syndrome.


Production and perception of word stress in children and adolescents with Down syndrome

Michèle Pettinato, and Jo Verhoeven

This article reviews the importance of word stress for typical language acquisition and presents evidence that in certain developmental language disorders, processing of word stress is disrupted. Two novel experiments were carried out testing the production and perception of word stress in a group of 16 children and adolescents with Down syndrome (ages 11-20) matched on receptive vocabulary level to 12 typically developing children (ages 4.06-7). The results indicated processing difficulties in both the production and perception of more difficult and later acquired stress patterns as well as weak initial syllables at the beginnings of words. The impact of these difficulties on language acquisition processes is discussed and future avenues for research are sketched.