Reading and phonological awareness in children with Down syndrome: A longitudinal study

Many children with Down syndrome (DS) are capable of developing some reading and writing abilities. The purpose of this study was to further the knowledge of literacy learning and factors that influence that learning in children with DS. Twelve elementary school children with DS were followed over a 4.5-year period. All the children attended regular education classrooms with personal aides and resource rooms as support. Measures of the children's reading, language, cognitive, and phonological awareness abilities were collected three times. Analyses demonstrated that some reading ability was present in all but one of the children by the end of the study. Phonological awareness and word attack skills did not keep pace with word recognition abilities in these children. When age and mental age (i.e., the mean of the age-equivalent scores from the Pattern Analysis and Bead Memory subtests of the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale, 4(th) edition) were partialled out, word attack skill was uniquely predicted by measures of phoneme segmentation and auditory memory as well. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed.