Playful Activities for the Development of Oral and Written Language for Children and Adolescents with Down Syndrome

ABSTRACT: This paper aimed to investigate the results produced by a language workshop focused on the stimulation of phonological skills and the understanding of the alphabetic system, with a group composed of five children and adolescents with Down syndrome, aged between 9 to 12 years and 11 months. The work was developed by an interdisciplinary team, with a 90-minute duration, once a week, during one year, and was carried out in the therapeutic playroom of a university hospital in the Southeast Region of the country. The methodology was that of collective case studies and the research was composed of a pre-test, intervention, and post-test application. The instruments used evaluated the reading of isolated words; phonological awareness; sequential auditory memory, the ability to repeat real words and non-words. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences - SPSS, version 23.0, was used for the data analysis with the Student t test. The results show statistical significance for phonological awareness skills of rhyme, syllabic manipulation and transposition, segmentation, synthesis, manipulation and phonemic transposition; phonological work memory measured by the repetition of non-dissyllable words, and readings of isolated high-frequency trisyllable words. It was concluded that the systematic stimulation of cognitive-linguistic abilities, especially the phonological ones, was able to favor the learning of the reading and writing of children and adolescents with Down syndrome.