Tense and aspect in Cypriot Greek Down Syndrome

Developmental patterns and coping strategies

Bibliographic Data

ID4567833
AuthorsChristiana Christodoulou (0000-0002-4162-5221, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume13
Issue2
Pages155-186
Publication date2013-12-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistic Variation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2211-6834 • E-ISSN: 2211-6842
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/lv.13.2.02chr
OpenAlexW1973245559
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited40

This study examines the production of tense and aspect of Cypriot Greek adults diagnosed with Down Syndrome and children with typical language development. Despite the evidently low IQ scores, and comparatively lower MLU scores, the performance of Cypriot Greek adults with Down Syndrome with tense and aspect is almost at ceiling with 95.7% accuracy for tense and 97.2% for aspect. These results suggest that at least certain aspects of the Down Syndrome grammatical system (e.g. inflectional marking) can be (fully) acquired. It was observed that both groups have developed three coping strategies, when not using a verb as targeted or expected; they either (i) use an alternative feature value, (ii) omit the entire verb, or quite rarely (iii) omit the inflectional suffix. Inconsistencies in the results across different languages suggest that cross-linguistic differences potentially related to the inflectional system of each language might be responsible for the different realization of problematic performance. Keywords: Down Syndrome; language development; inflectional marking; tense; aspect

Linguistics · Modern Greek · Past tense · Present tense · Suffix · Verb · Language Development and Disorders · Philosophy · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Williams Syndrome Research

Tools

Open DOI