World Down Syndrome Congress, 2018

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.



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.  



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.



Liz Smith in her poster session

We have had some lovely days in Glasgow both substantial and socially. Research plans have been made, ideas for funding applications have been discussed, and we have also met with Norwegian parents and resource persons. After all these years in the same research community many of these people have been good friends that we really appreciate to stay in touch with. We are now about to arrive in Norway again after some intensive days but Liz will stay for two more days in Glasgow. I am grateful for this year’s congress and for being part of this research community! Looking forward to the next world congress in Dubai in 2022.