Jennifer G. Wishart

Emotion recognition by children with Down syndrome : Investigation of specific impairments and error patterns

The ability of children with Down syndrome to recognize expressions of emotion was compared to performance in typically developing and nonspecific intellectual disability groups matched on either MA or a performance-related measure. Our goal was to (a) resolve whether specific emotions present recognition difficulties; (b) investigate patterns of errors; and (c) explore the relationships among emotion-recognition ability and cognitive, linguistic, and adaptive behavior levels. Emotion-recognition ability in the Down syndrome group was significantly poorer than in the typically developing group overall, particularly for fearful expressions. Error patterns and relationships between task performance and assessment measures also differed across groups. Findings are consistent with a neurological explanation of specific deficits in sociocognitive functioning in children with Down syndrome.

The effects of motor skill on object permanence

Abstract Piaget found that infants in the first year of life will not remove a cloth or a cup that they have seen cover a toy. Part of the difficulty is a motor skill problem. However, deficits in motor skill are not sufficient to account for the failure in the situation. We cannot assume that out of sight is out of mind for such infants for they will reach out to obtain an object that has been made to go out of sight by switching off the room lights, leaving the baby in total darkness.

Relationship between speech, oromotor, language and cognitive abilities in children with Down's syndrome

BACKGROUND Children and young people with Downs syndrome present with deficits in expressive speech and language, accompanied by strengths in vocabulary comprehension compared with non-verbal mental age. Intelligibility is particularly low, but whether speech is delayed or disordered is a controversial topic. Most studies suggest a delay, but no studies explore the relationship between cognitive or language skills and intelligibility. AIMS This study sought to determine whether severity of speech disorder correlates with language and cognitive level and to classify the types of errors, developmental or non-developmental, that occur in the speech of children and adolescents with Downs syndrome. METHODS & PROCEDURES Fifteen children and adolescents with Downs syndrome (aged 9-18 years) were recruited. Participants completed a battery of standardized speech, language and cognitive assessments. The phonology assessment was subject to phonological and phonetic analyses. Results from each test were correlated to determine relationships. OUTCOME & RESULTS Individuals with Downs syndrome present with deficits in receptive and expressive language that are not wholly accounted for by their cognitive delay. Receptive vocabulary is a strength in comparison with expressive and receptive language skills, but it was unclear from the findings whether it is more advanced compared with non-verbal cognitive skills. The majority of speech errors were developmental in nature, but all of the children with Downs syndrome showed at least one atypical or non-developmental speech error. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Children with Downs syndrome present with speech disorders characterized by atypical, and often unusual, errors alongside many developmental errors. A lack of correlation between speech and cognition or language measures suggests that the speech disorder in Downs syndrome is not simply due to cognitive delay. Better differential diagnosis of speech disorders in Downs syndrome is required, allowing interventions to target the specific disorder in each individual.

Recognition of identity and expression in faces by children with Down syndrome.

The ability of three groups of children (with Down syndrome, age-matched with nonspecific developmental delay, and younger typically developing) to recognize identity and expression in adult faces was examined. In Experiment 1, the children with Down syndrome were equally proficient at recognizing unfamiliar faces when expression was varied but significantly poorer at recognizing expression overall, with a specific deficit in perceiving surprise and fear. In Experiment 2, using rotated faces, they were significantly worse at recognizing expression as well as at identifying known faces. These results, in conjunction with lack of any improvement with age, suggest that there is a specific deficit in processing facial expressions associated with Down syndrome, a finding consistent with the emerging picture of neurological disruption in this syndrome.

Reaching in the Dark

Reaching for noise-making objects presented in darkness declines, then recovers, during infancy. The most probable explanation of this U-shaped function would seem to involve changes in reaching, changes in the perception of success, and changes in the body schema. There is no need to postulate any U-shaped change within the auditory system.

Social cognition in children with Down's syndrome: challenges to research and theory building

Characterising how socio-cognitive abilities develop has been crucial to understanding the wider development of typically developing children. It is equally central to understanding developmental pathways in children with intellectual disabilities such as Downs syndrome. While the process of acquisition of socio-cognitive abilities in typical development and in autism has received considerable attention, socio-cognitive development in Downs syndrome has received far less scrutiny. Initial work in the 1970s and 1980s provided important insights into the emergence of socio-cognitive abilities in the childrens early years, and recently there has been a marked revival of interest in this area, with research focusing both on a broader range of abilities and on a wider age range. This annotation reviews some of these more recent findings, identifies outstanding gaps in current understanding, and stresses the importance of the development of theory in advancing research and knowledge in this field. Barriers to theory building are discussed and the potential utility of adopting a transactional approach to theory building illustrated with reference to a model of early socio-cognitive development in Downs syndrome. The need for a more extensive model of social cognition is emphasised, as is the need for larger-scale, finer-grained, longitudinal work which recognises the within-individual and within-group variability which characterises this population. The value of drawing on new technologies and of adapting innovative research paradigms from other areas of typical and atypical child psychology is also highlighted.

Social Cognition in Children with Down Syndrome

Abstract Children with Down syndrome face considerable intellectual challenges. Despite the widespread belief that their social understanding is relatively “spared,” many also experience significant difficulties at an interpersonal level. This chapter assesses the literature on sociocognitive development in Down syndrome and the evidence for strengths or weaknesses in understanding the social behaviors, emotions, and intentions of others. It highlights the predominant focus to date on infants and preschool children and the consequent need for more research at older ages, ideally through larger‐scale, cross‐syndromic, and longitudinal studies. It also underlines the need to tie knowledge of developmental trajectories not only to the underlying neurobiology of Down syndrome but also to aspects of the childrens social environment. Investigating how interpersonal understanding is used in learning contexts and translating this knowledge into more focused support programs should also be a priority.

Do current consent and confidentiality requirements impede or enhance research with children with learning disabilities

Recent changes in UK legislation on data protection and confidentiality have affected key aspects of the research process. They have led to much stricter approaches to research governance, leading in turn to more stringent scrutiny by medical ethics committees and National Health Service (NHS) Trusts. Almost all stages of research are affected, from participant recruitment to storage of data, eating into researcher time and consuming significant resources. The resulting constraints are examined in relation to a research programme on development in children with learning disabilities, highlighting the practical and ethical issues arising, with informed consent a particular challenge. Being multidisciplinary, learning disability research has to satisfy numerous regulatory bodies. For participants’ rights to be fully respected and for projects to be completed within time and on budget, all contributors to the research process, including funders, need to be aware of the additional implications and demands imposed by the new regulations.

Collaborative Learning: Comparison of Outcomes for Typically Developing Children and Children with Intellectual Disabilities.

Collaborative learning is widely used in mainstream education but rarely utilized with children who have intellectual disabilities, possibly on the assumption that the metacognitive skills on which it capitalizes are less likely to be available. Effects of collaborative learning experience on a core cognitive skill, sorting by category, were investigated in three child groups: typically developing (TD) children, children with nonspecific intellectual disabilities (NSID) and children with Down syndrome (DS). Following collaboration, sorting performance improved significantly in lower ability partners in TD-TD pairings, with this pattern reversed in NSID-NSID pairings. Neither partner improved significantly in DS-NSID pairings, suggesting that the sociability attributed to children with DS did not necessarily support either their or their partners learning in this social context.

Electropalatographic therapy for children and young people with Down's syndrome

Articulation disorders in Downs syndrome (DS) are prevalent and often intractable. Individuals with DS generally prefer visual to auditory methods of learning and may therefore find it beneficial to be given a visual model during speech intervention, such as that provided by electropalatography (EPG). In this study, participants with Downs syndrome, aged 10:1 to 18:9, received 24 individualized therapy sessions using EPG. Simultaneous acoustic and EPG recordings were made pre- and post-intervention during 10 repetitions of a word list containing lingua-palatal consonants. Participants also completed the DEAP phonology sub-test at both time points. Post-treatment, all participants showed qualitative and quantifiable differences in EPG patterns and improvements in DEAP percentage consonants correct. EPG assessment and therapy appears a positive approach for identifying and improving articulatory patterns in children with DS.