The impact of home language exposure on development of the societal language for children with Down Syndrome in England

1. Yuko Matsuoka (King's College London)
2. Eloi Puig-Mayenco (King's College London)
3. Rebecca Ward (University of South Wales)

Correspondence: yuko.matsuoka@kcl.ac.uk

Existing studies on language development in children with Down Syndrome (DS) have predominantly focused on monolingual children. Limited studies that explored language development in bilingual children with DS are from bilingual societies such as Quebec or Wales (Bird et al., 2005; Ward & Sanoudaki, 2021; but see Perovic et al., 2025). In England, the number of pupils who speak English as an additional language has been increasing, reaching 21.4% in 2025 (Department for Education, 2025); however, their bilingual language development is not supported at the societal level. The current study focuses on the school language (i.e., English) development of such bilingual children with DS in England. The research question asks if the English language skills of bilingual children with DS, who are exposed to language(s) other than English at home, are different from those of their monolingual counterparts.

The data is being collected using the CELF-P (Semel et al., 1998) and the LITMUS-MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2019) from children with DS living in England (age 6-16). I will present the preliminary results from 12 children (6 being bilingual) in the conference. The data is being analysed separately for lexical skills and morphosyntactic skills, highlighting the potential distinct effects of bilingualism on different language subdomains that have been found for typically developing bilingual children. This study will be the first study that explores the language development of bilingual children with DS who grew up in England, that analyses lexical and morphosyntactic skills respectively.

References

Bird, E. K.-R., Cleave, P., Trudeau, N., Thordardottir, E., Sutton, A., & Thorpe, A. (2005). The language abilities of bilingual children with Down Syndrome. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14(3), 187–199. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058\-0360\(2005/019\)

Department for Education (2025). Schools, pupils and their characteristics: Academic year 2024/25. Department for Education. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics

Gagarina, N. V., Klop, D., Kunnari, S., Tantele, K., Välimaa, T., Balčiūnienė, I., Bohnacker, U., & Walters, J. (2019). MAIN: Multilingual assessment instrument for narratives. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 56, 155. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.56.2019.414

Perovic, A., Levy, K., Aertsen, I., & Baldacchino, A. (2025). Bilingualism Does Not Hinder Grammatical Development in Down Syndrome: Evidence from a Sentence Repetition Task. Behavioral Sciences, 15(6), 791. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15060791

Semel, E., Wiig, E. H., & Secord, W. A. (1998). Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, Third Edition. The Thirteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook.

Ward, R., & Sanoudaki, E. (2021). Language profiles of Welsh-English bilingual children with Down syndrome. Journal of Communication Disorders, 93, 106126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2021.106126