Royal Society grant for work on Down syndrome

News release from the University of Bristol (UK), 22 October 2009:

Professor Chris Jarrold from the Department of Experimental Psychology has been awarded a £12,000 grant from the Royal Society for his research into children with Down syndrome.

The main aim of the project is to analyse the extent to which individuals with Down syndrome are able to understand what they read. Individuals with Down syndrome often show relatively strong reading skills but their comprehension of what they read lags behind their ability to read words.

The research aims to evaluate whether reading comprehension in Down syndrome is simply delayed, or whether it is dissociated from reading skills by seeing whether individuals make use of sentence contexts when reading homographs (words with different meanings but the same spellings).

This will shed important light on the question of whether people with Down syndrome are just ‘good readers’ of words or are also able to ‘read for meaning’, the ultimate aim of literacy acquisition.

The project will run until May 2011.