A Research On Communicative Acts In School-aged Children With Down Syndrome

Since there are a large number of researches on communicative acts in children with Down syndrome, the knowledge on Down syndrome has been improved. Therefore, the rehabilitation of children with Down syndrome has been strongly supported on the basis of these researches. Few researches in this field have been developed in our country. Since the current related research has been done putting Down syndrome in the group of children with mental retardation, the effects of the results are limited in clinical use.This research was conducted in a semi-structured play context which the children with Down syndrome and their main care-givers take part in. The procedures of their communication were video-recorded. The speech acts and nonverbal -communication acts during their communication were transcribed. As effective instruments, INCA-A and CLAN were employed to code and analyze these communicative acts. On the basis of the analysis, some conclusions were drawn.Speech acts are the main communicative medium used by the children and main care-givers during their communication, while nonverbal-communication acts play an important role in making the child understood. The communicative acts in children with Down syndrome do develop while their mental-age grows. The cognitive levels of the children with Down syndrome influence their communicative performance, and the influence differs within the levels of Social Interchange, Speech Acts and Pragmatic Flexibility. The cognitive levels make more impact on the performance of speech acts than the nonverbal-communication acts. There is no significant difference between the boys and girls with Down syndrome generally, and the only difference occurred in TXT, which is one of the social interchange types.Discussing a joint focus attention (DJF) and Negotiating the immediate activity (NIA) are the main social interchange types during the communication between the...