language skills in preschool children with down syndrome and non-verbal mental age-matched controls

Down syndrome (ds) as a chromosomal abnormality has different symptoms including cognitive problems and language delay. studies showed a heterogeneous profile of language skills in this group of children. this study aimed to provide further information about the most vulnerable area of language -grammatical skills- regarding the unanalyzable utterances, clauses, phrases, grammatical morphemes, and mean length of utterances (mlu) in children with ds and compare them with those of non-verbal age-matched controls. materials and methods: the grammatical structures of 12 children with ds (non-verbal age=39 months) were compared to those of 50 non-verbal mental age-matched controls (non-verbal age=41 months). clause, phrase, and grammatical morphemes were investigated through spontaneous language sample analysis according to persian-language assessment remediation and screening procedure (p-larsp). results: children with ds had higher percentages of unanalysable text units compared with typically matched peers (p≤0.001). the mlu, number of phrases and clauses structures, and inflectional morphemes were significantly lower in children with ds compared with typical children (p<0.001). conclusion: children with ds showed a noticeable gap in grammatical structures compared with typical children. the possibility of specific language problems in children with ds should be considered by future studies.