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Background: Down syndrome (DS) is associated with poor language skills that seem disproportionate to general nonverbal ability, but the nature and causes of this deficit are unclear. We assessed how individuals with DS understand complex linguistic constructions, and considered how cognitive ability and memory and impact the ability of those with DS to process these sentence types.

Methods: There were three groups participating in the study: children with DS (n= 33) and two control groups composed of children with cognitive impairment of unknown aetiology (CI)(n= 32) and children with typical development (n= 33). The three groups did not differ on raw scores on a test of non-verbal cognitive ability. Using a newly devised animation task, we examined how well individuals with DS (n= 33) could understand relative clauses, complement clauses and adverbial clauses compared to children with CI and typically …