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With so many factors influencing the data, a systematic exploration of the differences between the children as described by prior researchers helps to narrow the focus on the most interesting points. The unique circumstance of parenting one normally developing child and one child with Down’s Syndrome of the same ages was documented in the case study by Graham and Scudder. The study found that parents do treat the children differently, giving more attention on average to the developmentally disadvantaged child and attempting to elicit responses from the child though the child typically would rather remain quiet or distant. This also allows for the normally developing child to speak up for the Down’s Syndrome child, which is an element which we witnessed in our observations. Twin 1’s speech was exemplary of the mid-SES child who attempts to complicate and improve his speech through the use of adverbs (Johnston 46). While Twin 2 never used such constructions, Twin 1 had very advanced sentence structures, reflecting his intelligence, though occasionally using the forms incorrectly in a trial and error method (“not very”, “I can’t very snap”). Alternately, in attempting to elicit conversation from Twin 2, it was uncommon to receive a long response without lots of prompting. This passivity makes it difficult to know how well the Down’s Syndrome child actually knows how to speak (Rosenburg 369).
Research
In fact, an interesting phenomenon common to autistic children, echolalia, was often observed when the child did not understand the comment or just seemed to be emphasizing the speech from the researcher. This does not mean to imply that the child had autism, rather, in researching the phenomenon it is clear that this is another manifestation of Down’s Syndrome’s effect on the development of this child. Children with Down’s Syndrome do not necessarily have deviant development, in fact their development is often said to be simply delayed but in other ways identical to a normal child’s (Graham 108). Thus, since echolalia or similar repetitious phrasing “accounts for 6% of 2-year-old’s utterances”, Twin 2’s reliance on repetition and imitation suggests a delayed development rather than something abnormal (Fay 406). As the child grows, she may give up this habit of repeating things just spoken to her, though she may never reach the highest levels of complex speech because of environmental factors and constraints on the critical period of language learning. Libby Kumin suggests that in order to more quickly move a Down’s Syndrome child through this one or two word phase, that the parent should enforce the child as speaking correctly and then offer extensions for her to fill in to create longer utterances (Kumin 81).
