Communicative profile used by children with Down syndrome.
BACKGROUND
the communication of children with Down syndrome (DS) is frequently impaired due to difficulties in the phonological, syntactic and semantic aspects of language. In order to compensate these difficulties, many children use gestures for a longer period of time than children who present typical development (TD).


OBJECTIVE
to verify the performance of children with DS regarding their communicative profile (verbal, oral and gestural) during a play situation and a spontaneous interaction with an adult.


METHODS
28 children with DS were studied in two different play situations: with a speech-language therapist and with the adult caregiver. Pragmatic theories were used to analyse the data. To determine the statistical significance of the results, the statistical tests of Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon and the confidence interval were used with a significance of 5%.


RESULTS
the verbal communication mean was used mostly during the interaction with the caregivers and the gestural communication mean was used mostly during the interaction with the therapists.


CONCLUSIONS
considering that the verbal communication mean is the one which is socially more used, the play situation with the caregiver was the most effective. However, although less verbal communicative acts were produced during the interaction with the speech-language therapist, the child used gestures to communicate, that is, the lack or little verbal communication did not stop the child from communicating with the interlocutor.
Porto-Cunha
Eliza
E
Universidade Federal de São Paulo. portoeliza@usp.br
Limongi
Suelly Cecilia Olivan
SC
D000328:Adult; D017028:Caregivers; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004314:Down Syndrome / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D009633:Nonverbal Communication / Q000502:physiology*; D010988:Play and Playthings; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*