Humour and laughter have often been portrayed as fundamentally cultural and social phenomena. They can be used to tell us about children's ability to engage socially and to understand others, but have rarely been explored for this purpose. The present paper summarises the results of a study of simple forms of humour in children with Down syndrome and with autism, two groups which are reported t...

Many children with Down syndrome display asynchrony in development with the acquisition of language preceding at a slower pace than the acquisition of other cognitive skills. Recent research suggests that the expressive language delays that are displayed by these children may be associated with an earlier disturbance in the development of nonverbal requesting skills (Mundy, Sigman, Kasari, & Yi...

Down Syndrome Parents' Support Group Siriraj Hospital was established on February 14, 1993. It consists of a group of pediatricians, nurses, parents of children with Down Syndrome (DS) who received care at the Genetics Clinic, Division of Medical Genetics, Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital. The objective is to educate parents with DS children whose diagnosis of DS g...

The purpose of this study was to compare the onset and severity of gingivitis in children with Down syndrome, when compared to a healthy control group of children. The subjects included 41 children with Down syndrome ages two to 14 years (mean age: 7.6 years) and 112 age-matched healthy controls. We assessed the gingival health of all subjects using the gingival inflammation (M-PMA) index and p...

Children with Down syndrome typically have weaknesses in oral language, but it has been suggested that this domain may benefit from learning to read. Amongst oral language skills, vocabulary is a relative strength although there is some evidence of difficulties in learning the phonological form of spoken words. This study investigated the effect of orthographic support on spoken word learning w...

The purpose in this study was to examine temperament characteristics in children with Down syndrome and to consider the effects of condition, chronological age and measurement on these characteristics. This presentation addresses three questions: Are there differences in temperament between children with Down syndrome and normally developing children? Are there differences in temperament across...

background and objective: the present study investigated executive functions in students with high functioning autism (hfa) and students with educable down syndrome (ds) with normal healthy students.     methods: fifteen boy students with hfa, 15 boy students with educable intellectual disability and 15 normal healthy boy students (aged between¬ 7-15 years) were recruited from educational servi...

This study examined the effect of word level phonological knowledge on learning to read new words in Down syndrome compared to typical development. Children were taught to read 12 nonwords, 6 of which were pre-trained on their phonology. The 16 individuals with Down syndrome aged 8-17 years were compared first to a group of 30 typically developing children aged 5-7 years matched for word readin...