This thesis presents a series of investigations into communicative interaction between mothers and their preschool children with Down's Syndrome (DS), and mothers and their infants with DS. Reference to the literature in this area indicates that there is a need to determine not only how the DS child and/or her/his mother differ from their nonhandicapped peers but also ways in which DS children's language can be accelerated. Insofar as the preschool child with DS is concerned, a series of four studies are presented. The first of these investigates the effect of the label "DS" upon the mothers' perceptions of children thus labelled. Using videotapes of nonhandicapped, above average infants, it is demonstrated that some of the mothers' ratings of children are negatively affected if the child is described as having "DS". This is found to occur to a significant degree in both mothers of DS children and mothers of nonhandicapped children, although the effect is not identical in both groups across all the ratings measured. To investigate whether any such negative distortions, or "labelling effects" would affect the interactive behaviour of mothers of ES children, a sample of mothers of DS children was videotaped, with each mother in turn playing separately with 2 sisters. These girls were four years old, nonhandicapped, non-identical twins. For the purposes of this experiment, one of the twins (the more developmentally advanced and the physically larger of the 2) was always described to the mothers as having DS, her sister always being described as nonhandicapped (i.e. the child least like a DS child - if either could possibly be thought of in that way - was described as having-DS). It was found that all but one mother believed the experimental manipulation of the label; videotape analyses revealed furthermore that mothers treated the sisters significantly differently. Specifically the supposed DS child was ignored more often than her sister with mothers not responding to her attempts to initiate interaction and thus giving her less opportunity to control or direct the interactions. Mothers also used different types of interrogatives with her, avoiding the use of those questions which required more complex answers (wh- type questions) and using overall far more questions requiring only a simple yes/no response. Moreover, audio-recorded interviews with the subjects in this experiment revealed them to be explaining and describing the supposed DS child's behaviour in a very negative way, interpreting her behaviour and speech on the basis of her diagnostic label, giving her little or no credit for any achievements. These results are discussed with reference to the literature on mother and DS child interaction, expectancy effects, and with reference to social psychological studies of stereotyping.

Some school psychologists have made a practice of using adverse incidents in a child's early development as the basis for diagnosing children's reading difficulties and attributing those incidents to a possible organic base. However, the previous research has not been wholely supportive of a link between developmental history concerns and the acquisition of reading related skills. Thus, this research was intended to determine which incidents in the reported developmental history provided the best predictors of later reading difficulty. The developmental history form from the U.B.C. Education Clinic was used as the data gathering instrument and requested parental information about the child's family background, pregnacy and birthing factors, acquisition of developmental milestones, and health history. This instrument was chosen as it is uniformly completed by the U.B.C. school psychology students. This research was also intended to determine which areas of the form were the most effective in predicting later reading difficulties. Obtained samples of successful reading students (n=28) and delayed readers (n=35) were compared in terms of the significant incidents reported in their developmental histories. Results did substantiate some of the previous research in terms of the family background characteristics, pregnancy and birth concerns, and developmental milestone profile, previously associated with later reading difficulty. No significant incidents were noted in the health history section though it was concluded that valuable information appeared in all sections of the current developmental history form. However, this research design did not allow for predictive statistics as initially intended due to the qualitative nature of the data collected. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

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This study explores similarities and differences in turntaking structures in the discourse of a group of typical children and one atypical child. Nineteen normally developing pre-school children and one atypical child were videotaped reading books with their parents. Each of the nineteen parent/child dyads were videotaped at the child's pre-school, and the atypical child (Ben) was videotaped at school both with a trained educator and with his mother. Analyses of the resulting videotapes yielded categorical data on types and structures of turntaking. The utterances of the typical children appeared most often in the category of response. This finding also applied to Ben when he was interacting with his teacher, although when Ben was interacting with his mother the majority of his utterances appeared in the category of imitation. Parents of the typical children used primarily responses, mands and turnabouts. The greatest difference between Ben's mother and the other parents is found in the categories of response and mand which were lower in the case of Ben's mother. It appears that conversational turntaking in a language delayed child is different from the pattern of conversational turntaking in a group of typical children. If indeed the This study explores similarities and differences in turntaking structures in the discourse of a group of typical children and one atypical child. Nineteen normally developing pre-school children and one atypical child were videotaped reading books with their parents. Each of the nineteen parent/child dyads were videotaped at the child's pre-school, and the atypical child (Ben) was videotaped at school both with a trained educator and with his mother. Analyses of the resulting videotapes yielded categorical data on types and structures of turntaking. The utterances of the typical children appeared most often in the category of response. This finding also applied to Ben when he was interacting with his teacher, although when Ben was interacting with his mother the majority of his utterances appeared in the category of imitation. Parents of the typical children used primarily responses, mands and turnabouts. The greatest difference between Ben's mother and the other parents is found in the categories of response and mand which were lower in the case of Ben's mother. It appears that conversational turntaking in a language delayed child is different from the pattern of conversational turntaking in a group of typical children. If indeed the difficulty lies with interaction, or turntaking skills, this may have significant implications for approaches to remediation used with children who are identified as autistic or severely learning disabled. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1966 G227 / Master of Science

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1979 L586 / Master of Arts

This study compares the performance of unilingual normal, unilingual learning-disabled, bilingual normal, and bilingual learning-disabled groups of children from 8 to 11 years of age on acquisition of word meaning tasks. The tasks were derived from the Re-cognition Function Level of Kass's theory. Initial subject selection involved using teacher judgments and an examination of school files to determine the presence of learning disability. Bilingual linguistic background was determined by teacher and parental judgments and by ability in verbal conversation to achieve a criterion of approximate equivalence between English and Spanish. Four groups of at least 15 subjects each were established, reflecting linguistic background (unilingual, bilingual) and presence of learning disability (learning-disabled, normal). Final assignment of subjects to learning-disabled and normal groups was verified by the administration of four tests and a discriminant analysis of the results. Five experimental tasks involving the acquisition of word meaning were devised and administered to the subjects. These tasks were: Task 1, Word Classification; Task 2, Word Class Labeling; Task 3, Verbal Analogies; Task 4, Synonyms and Antonyms; and Task 5, Creative Language. Task 5, Creative Language, consisted of Parts A (written) and Part B (verbal). An Abstract-Concrete Scale score and a Words per Sentence score resulted from both Part A and Part B. The results of the study were as follows: (1) Learning-disabled subjects, regardless of linguistic grouping, scored significantly lower than normal subjects on the Word Classification, Word Class Labeling, Verbal Analogies, and Synonyms and Antonyms tasks. They also scored significantly lower than normal subjects on the Creative Language Task Part A (written) and Part B (verbal), Abstract-Concrete Scale. No difference was present on the Creative Language Task, Part A (written) and Part B (verbal), Words per Sentence. (2) Bilingual subjects, regardless of the presence of learning disability, scored significantly lower than unilingual subjects on the Word Class Labeling and Verbal Analogies tasks. They scored significantly higher than unilingual subjects on the Creative Language Task, Part A (written), Words per Sentence. (3) Younger subjects scored significantly lower than older subjects on the Word Classification and Verbal Analogies tasks and on the Creative Language Task, Part A (written) and Part B (verbal), Abstract-Concrete Scale. (4) No significant interaction effect (presence of learning disability x linguistic background) was obtained on any of the tasks. The results of this study support these conclusions. First, children labeled as learning disabled have skill deficits in acquiring word meaning, with the qualification that measures of the quantity of language production do not consistently correspond to measures of the quality of language production. Second, bilingual children may appear to display deficits in the acquisition of word meaning if task selection in the secondary language (English) does not take practice factors into account. However, bilingual learning-disabled children display these deficits in both primary and secondary languages. Third, skill in the acquisition of word meaning improves across the age span of 8 to 11 years regardless of the presence of learning disability.