Cross Modal Generalization of Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary in Children with Down Syndrome

Abstract

Children with Down syndrome (DS) display language deficits in expressive and receptive skills beyond what is predicted by nonlingusitic cognitive skills. Clinically, a ubiquitous presumption is that vocabulary taught in one modality will generalize incidentally to the other, untreated modality. Five children with DS (four male, one female, ages 3;6-5;1) were each taught three orthogonal sets of receptive and expressive vocabulary within a multiple probe single subject design. During each probe condition, vocabulary knowledge for trained and untrained modalities was probed. Cross modal generalization probes for all five children indicated moderate transfer from expressive modality to receptive and relatively low receptive generalization to the expressive modality. These results support expressive vocabulary interventions for children with DS provided that clinicians systematically test for generalization to receptive knowledge. Conversely, receptive vocabulary training is much less likely to generalize across modality