Tense and aspect in Cypriot Greek Down Syndrome: Developmental patterns and coping strategies

This study examines the production of tense and aspect of Cypriot Greek adults diagnosed with Down Syndrome and children with typical language development. Despite the evidently low IQ scores, and comparatively lower MLU scores, the performance of Cypriot Greek adults with Down Syndrome with tense and aspect is almost at ceiling with 95.7% accuracy for tense and 97.2% for aspect. These results suggest that at least certain aspects of the Down Syndrome grammatical system (e.g. inflectional marking) can be (fully) acquired. It was observed that both groups have developed three coping strategies, when not using a verb as targeted or expected; they either (i) use an alternative feature value, (ii) omit the entire verb, or quite rarely (iii) omit the inflectional suffix. Inconsistencies in the results across different languages suggest that cross-linguistic differences potentially related to the inflectional system of each language might be responsible for the different realization of problematic performance. Keywords: Down Syndrome; language development; inflectional marking; tense; aspect