Background: It is generally assumed that children with Down syndrome (DS) present a deficit in lexical production relative to their cognitive abilities. However, the literature on this topic has recently shown several contradictory results. In addition, most studies only consider vocabulary production in its vocal modality. However it is also…

Background: Down syndrome (DS) has been the focus of much cognitive and developmental research; however, there is a gap in knowledge regarding sustained attention, particularly across different sensory domains. This research examined the hypothesis that children with DS would demonstrate superior visual rather than auditory performance on a…

Children with autism experience difficulties in understanding social affective cues, and it has been suggested that such deficits will generalize to music. In order to investigate this proposal, typically developing individuals and children with autism and Down syndrome were compared on tasks measuring perception of affective and movement states…

Phonotactic patterns of seven 11-15-year-old Kannada speaking children with Down syndrome (DS), mental age matched children with mental retardation (MR) without DS and six 4-5-year-old typically developing (TD) children were investigated. Conversational speech analyses and target analyses of conversational speech were carried out in all three…

Background: In the last few years, experimental data have been reported on differences in implicit memory processes of genetically distinct groups of individuals with Intellectual Disability (ID). These evidences are relevant for the more general debate on supposed asynchrony of cognitive maturation in children with abnormal brain development.…

This study investigates the syntactic abilities of ten individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) (mean chronological age: 8;9 years; mean mental age: 4;8 years) and Down's syndrome (DS) (mean chronological age: 8;7 years; mean mental age: 4;6 years), matched individually on chronological age, mental age and performance IQ. The syntactic components…

It is a matter of debate whether the development of theory of mind (ToM) depends on linguistic development or is, rather, an expression of cognitive development. The study of genetic syndromes, which are characterized by intellectual impairment as well as by different linguistic profiles, may provide useful information with respect to this issue.…

Williams (WS) and Down syndromes (DS) are two genetic disorders that involve intellectual disability (ID) and have been extensively studied over the past decades because of the unique linguistic profiles they exhibit. Recent investigations seek to explore the fractionation of linguistic components within the cognitive system using genetically…

The limited literature on awareness of differences and stigma in people with intellectual disabilities is largely sociological, emphasises pathology, and has rarely used a developmental perspective with representative samples. Interviews, photographs and standardised tests were used to investigate such awareness with 77 young adults with Down…

The British picture vocabulary scales (BPVS-II) and the Leiter international performance scales (Leiter-R), both restandardised in 1997, are often used in experimental studies to match individuals with intellectual impairment. Both provide a brief measure of mental age, and cover a wide ability range using a simple format. The BPVS-II assesses…

Tested prefrontal and hippocampal functions in school-aged individuals with Down syndrome (DS) compared functions with those of typically developing children individually matched on mental age. Found that hippocampal and prefrontal composite scores contributed unique variance to the prediction of mental age and adaptive behavior. Noted a…

The limited literature on awareness of differences and stigma in people with intellectual disabilities is largely sociological, emphasises pathology, and has rarely used a developmental perspective with representative samples. Interviews, photographs and standardised tests were used to investigate such awareness with 77 young adults with Down…

This study explored the self-understanding of 77 young people with Down syndrome aged from 17 to 24 years, with verbal mental ages ranging from less than 2 years 6 months to 12 years 4 months. The aim was to determine whether the self-understanding of these young people followed a typical developmental pathway, whether they were making social…

Individuals with Down's syndrome (DS) have an auditory short-term memory span disproportionately shorter than the non-verbal mental age (MA). This study evaluated the Baddeley model's claim that verbal short-term memory deficits might arise from slower speaking rates (and thus less material rehearsed in a 2 s passive store) by using the sentence…

This pilot study was designed to examine mental rotation ability in individuals with Down syndrome. 7 individuals with Down syndrome (mean mental age = 8.18 +/- 2.73 years; mean chronological age = 29.8 +/- 5.4 years) and a group of 9 typically developing children, matched for mental age, (mean mental age = 8.40 +/- 1.73 years; mean chronological…