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  • Phonological Priming Effects in Children with Down Syndrome: Evidence of a Phonologically Based Lexical Organization

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Abstract:
  • Typically-developing (TD) infants as young as 24 months of age use phonological information to establish links between the words of their early lexicons (Mani & Plunkett, 2010; 2011), which facilitates their word recognition and learning. However, Down syndrome (DS) children are reported to have difficulties in learning and establishing detailed phonological representations (Jarrold & Thorn & Stephens, 2009). The present study aimed to evaluate if DS children establish lexical networks based on phonological similarity between words, by exploring the effects of lexical competition in a phonological priming task. We evaluated 24 children with DS and 24 children with TD (for both groups: mental verbal age; M= 40 months), matched by receptive vocabulary size, with a phonological priming adaptation of the intermodal preferential looking task. Children were presented with a Prime word in auditory form (/'ka.sa/ [house]) followed by the simultaneous presentation of two images on screen (Target-Distractor), and the auditory verbal label of the Target image (50 ms after the images-onset). In half of the trials the Prime and Target word shared phonological similarity in the initial position (e.g. /'ka.sa/ [house] – /'ka.ʝe/ [street]) and in the other half, there was no phonological relationship between both words. Probabilities of fixation to Target and Distractor were calculated for related and unrelated essays for each group (TD-DS). Children with DS showed inhibition of Target recognition in related trials compared to unrelated trials, while children with TD showed an absence of priming effects. Further analysis revealed a relationship between the Prime cohort size and the level of inhibition of Target recognition for both groups. Our results suggest children with DS possess sufficiently detailed phonological representations that allow them to efficiently cluster their lexical entries based on phonological similarities. Moreover, results are thought to reflect differences in the lexical competition processes between the TD and DS groups.
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