A Comparative Study of Discourse Comprehension of Lexical Relations between Normal and Educable Down syndrome Persian-Speaking Students

Down syndrome (DS) disease is a genetic disorder which is caused by an additional copy of chromosome 21 in patient’s cell. These individuals face with different limitations in their social life such as disorders in discourse production and comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to provide a comparative investigation of comprehension of lexical relations device as one of cohesion devices, including hyponymy, part- whole and collocation, according to Dooley and Levinsohn (2000) between normal and educable DS Persian-speaking students’ narrative discourse. To this end, 20 normal and 20 DS boys and girls were purposefully selected using convenience sampling from ordinary and exceptional schools of Kerman city in Mehr 1395. The subjects were asked to talk about the topic of “Going to the park”. Then their speech was recorded by one of the researchers. The gathered data was analyzed by SPSS software. The research results showed that only in the comprehension of collocation there was a significantly meaningful difference between the two groups of subjects but this difference was not significantly meaningful in analyzing the lexical relations as a whole