The speech of people with Down syndrome: linguistic analysis in phonological and syntactic terms
Keywords:
Down syndrome, production, errors, phonology, linguistic analysisAbstract
The speech of people with Down syndrome exhibits errors belonging to different linguistic levels. The existing literature in this regard focuses mainly on syntactic errors. However, there is a greater number of phonological errors that are commonly dismissed. Syntactic errors are currently seen as a result of suffering from middle ear infection during childhood and the high incidence rate of this disease in people with Down syndrome (Martin, Klusek, Estigarribia, & Roberts, 2009) (Chapman, 2006), ( Chapman, Schwartz, & Bird, 1991), (Roberts, Price, & Malkin, 2007) (Roberts, Price, & Malkin, 1997). The hypothesis of the present work is that the majority of the linguistic errors in the speech of people with Down síndrome are phonological rather that syntactic ones. The objective is to prove that errors in adults with Down syndrome are mostly phonological -although they are closely related to very precise morphological errors- and that they appear in a variety of ways, such as use of allophones or syllable omission in relation with tone and accent.
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