The research project The Development of Cypriot Greek in Individuals with Down Syndrome: Their Morphosyntactic Profile, and the Effects of Phonetics and Phonology (CGDS MorphoSyntax) examines primarily the morphosyntactic, but also phonetic and phonological, development of Cypriot Greek in children and adolescents diagnosed with Down Syndrome (aged 6–18) as well as young typically developing children (aged 2–6).
On the basis of ten experimental tasks tapping into production and comprehension, including elicited production, elicited imitation, story-telling, and picture selection, the linguistic performance is investigated for 30 CG-speaking children and adolescents with Down Syndrome (CG-DS: 6;0 to 18;11 years;months) and 60 CG-speaking children with typical language development (CG-TLD: 2;0 to 6;11), matched on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices and mean length of utterance. The tasks examine inflectional marking in addition to a variety of different syntactic structures (subjunctive, relative clauses, subject-to-object raising, wh-questions, nominal/adjectival predicates, clefts, etc.). We also study the phonetic and phonological system to determine whether potential articulation restrictions or a different, perhaps non-complete, development of the phonological system affect the production of morphosyntactic features.
Through this project, we additionally aim to document the developmental trajectory for the linguistic development of CG-DS and CG-TLD in addition to answering the general question of whether linguistic development is indeed dissociated from cognitive development. This project is the first of its kind, both on (Cypriot) Greek but also internationally.