Production and perception of word stress in children and adolescents with Down syndrome

This article reviews the importance of word stress for typical language acquisition and presents evidence that in certain developmental language disorders, processing of word stress is disrupted. Two novel experiments were carried out testing the production and perception of word stress in a group of 16 children and adolescents with Down syndrome (ages 11-20) matched on receptive vocabulary level to 12 typically developing children (ages 4.06-7). The results indicated processing difficulties in both the production and perception of more difficult and later acquired stress patterns as well as weak initial syllables at the beginnings of words. The impact of these difficulties on language acquisition processes is discussed and future avenues for research are sketched.