Abstract:
The aim of the present study was to measure rhyme awareness, along with alliteration and final phoneme detection, in a sample of children and adolescents with Down syndrome, compared with typically developing children of similar verbal mental age. Each phonological task was a judgment task requiring participants to decide whether two auditory words rhymed, alliterated, or shared the final phoneme. However, most participants with Down syndrome did not score above chance on a non phonological same different judgment control task. Although it was not possible to test the original hypotheses in this group, this finding is informative for future attempts to measure phonological skills in this population. Also, item analyses of data from typically developing children revealed specific performance patterns on the phonological tasks.
