This year the World Down syndrome Congress is organized in Glasgow by Down's
syndrome Scotland. More than 1,200 people from around the world are participating. The DSL+-project is represented at the congress with
Liz Smith, Liv Inger Engevik, Silje Hokstad, and Kari-Anne B. Næss.
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| The DSL+ delegates |
We aimed to learn about new research in the field of Down syndrome, meet
with international colleagues and parents, and arrange the Symposium on Research in Language and Communication among Children with
Down Syndrome. The objective of the symposium was to increase knowledge
about the language and communication interventions for children with Down
syndrome in order to improve the future research quality and intervention
approaches in the field of practice. In order to explore the current state of
the field and guide future research and practice this symposium first highlighted
the findings from a systematic review, summarizing the effect of existing interventions.
Second, the implementation quality in
the previous studies was reviewed. Thereafter, we presented two sub studies
from the DSL+-project. One of the sub studies reported the framework of the intervention and some preliminary findings of the
effect and the other was related to interactive
dialogical reading of the picture books included in the program. Our
symposium was more than filled to capacity; In addition to filling all seats people
was standing or sitting on the floor in the back of the congress room. I am thankful
to the audience for their participation and all the interesting questions and
comments after our presentations. Also, I would like to thank our international
colleagues for their interesting contributions in the discussions – and great
thanks to the fantastic DSL+-team.
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| Kelly Burgoyne |
During the congress there have been several interesting presentations for
us by e.g. Kelly Burgoyne who talked about shared book reading, Chris Lemons that
focused on research on enhancing literacy outcomes, and Sue Buckley who talked
about Developing evidence based early intervention and education. Yesterday
morning Deborah Fidler gave a very well structured and interesting talk on which
skills are important to monitor closely and to intervene in young children with
Down syndrome especially with the focus on school functioning. Fidler is a
great researcher within the field and has a long time experiences doing a lot
of great empirical work. This time I also found Fidler’s talk interesting but I
was a bit protonated by her crossing out both cognitive skills and
language/communication as NOT RELATED TO SCHOOL FUNCTIONING. Her focus in the
talk was of course the executive functioning which she obvious wanted to
highlight as important. However, there is challenging to demonstrate that an
effect is absolutely absent. Her interpretation of a non-significant result is in
my opinion taken way too long (I think it is this paper she was referring to: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4012569/pdf/167.pdf
). Eventual lack of unique contribution does not mean that cognition and
language and communication it is not contributing. This result depends among
others on overlap between measures, significance level, number of particippants
and power in the analysis. To make such a strong claim based on a sample size
around 20 and for three conditions can actually be totally misleading. I really
hope that the parents and practitioners among the audience not think that there
is no need for language training for the child to improve their school
functioning. A GREAT DEAL OF EVIDENCE HAS SHOWN THAT LANGUAGE IS IMPORTANT FOR
A RANGE OF LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENTAL AREAS RELEVANT TO ACADEMIC AS WELL AS
SOCIAL SKILLS. I had hope I had misunderstood something in her talk but a short
chat in the break with some of my international colleagues confirmed that my
understanding was not a result me not being native English speaker or not
following her justifications, Unfortunately there were not possible to ask
questions in this session so I still have a few unanswered questions for Fidler
regarding her interpretation of the results. The congress also had it’s own
poster area, Several poster presentations were given and especially I was interested
in the interventions by Rebecca Baxter on grammar and Lauren LeJeune on
phonological awareness. Liz Smith from our project group also gave a poster
presentation on a novel measure to track potential early signs of dementia.
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| Liz Smith in her poster session |
