Expressive Bound Morphemes in Malayalam Speaking Children with Down Syndrome

Abstract

This study is an attempt to examine expressive bound morphemes of Malayalam in 10 children, aged 6-18 years, with Down Syndrome (DS) as compared to 10 typically developing (TD) mental age matched controls. All the participants were having an expressive language level of two-word utterances and were native speakers of Malayalam. The productive use of six high-frequency nominal inflections of - Plural /kal/, Accusative /e/, Locative /il/, Genitive /ute/, / Dative case markers kk?/ & /n?/ and Conjunction /um/ was investigated using elicited Sentence Imitation Test in Malayalam (SIT-M, Treasa & Shyamala, 2013). Results revealed that DS group obtained significantly (p<0.05) poorer scores than the controls on all the subtests of SIT-M except on accusative case marker /e/. This suggests specific bound morpheme errors in children with DS which could serve as targets for grammatical morphology intervention.