The present study deals with the linguistic production of four children with Down Syndrome (aged 6-10 years). Each subject was audiotaped during verbal elicitation tasks. Both phonological and morphological abilities of the children are described paying particular attention to consonantal system and to free-standing morphemes. Our study differs from previous Italian research on Down Syndrome: for the first time the phonological description is based on a spectrographic analysis. The acoustic results reveal high percentage of substitution, assimilation processes and cluster reduction. A relevant delay in phonological development, with more errors in the production of later-developing sounds, was observed. Articulatory imprecision can be directly attributed to the oral and facial anomalies; in addition, general hypotonia and specific oral motor problems affect the coordination and the timing of articulatory gestures. The findings of the morphological analysis confirm that children with Down Syndrome omit many grammatical morphemes demonstrating particular difficulty with the production of the functional categories such as: articles, clitics, prepositions and auxiliaries. They show a consistent speech disorder that causes a simplification of many linguistic structures. The omission is probably a sort of economy strategy: functional words are non semantic elements with scarce phonetic and prosodic weight.
La produzione verbale dei soggetti con Sindrome di Down: aspetti fonologici e morfologici
SORIANELLO, Patrizia
2010-01-01
Abstract
The present study deals with the linguistic production of four children with Down Syndrome (aged 6-10 years). Each subject was audiotaped during verbal elicitation tasks. Both phonological and morphological abilities of the children are described paying particular attention to consonantal system and to free-standing morphemes. Our study differs from previous Italian research on Down Syndrome: for the first time the phonological description is based on a spectrographic analysis. The acoustic results reveal high percentage of substitution, assimilation processes and cluster reduction. A relevant delay in phonological development, with more errors in the production of later-developing sounds, was observed. Articulatory imprecision can be directly attributed to the oral and facial anomalies; in addition, general hypotonia and specific oral motor problems affect the coordination and the timing of articulatory gestures. The findings of the morphological analysis confirm that children with Down Syndrome omit many grammatical morphemes demonstrating particular difficulty with the production of the functional categories such as: articles, clitics, prepositions and auxiliaries. They show a consistent speech disorder that causes a simplification of many linguistic structures. The omission is probably a sort of economy strategy: functional words are non semantic elements with scarce phonetic and prosodic weight.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
