An Investigation on the Effect of Family-Centered Psychological Interventions on the Verbal Ability of Children with Down Syndrome

Background and Purpose: Due to the impaired brain development and muscle hypotonia in the early development period, children with Down syndrome suffer from delay in speech and verbal skills. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of family-centered psychological interventions on the enhancement of verbal ability in primary school children with Down syndrome. This semi-experimental study was of pretest-posttest control group design. The research population consisted of all 10-11-year-old primary school children with Down syndrome in Tehran in the academic year of 2016-2017. Among them, 30 were selected by purposive sampling and then randomly assigned to either the experimental or the control group. The experimental group received 24 sessions of family-centered interventions within three months, while the control group received no intervention. The research instrument, i.e. the new version of Tehran Stanford – Binet intelligence scale (Afrooz & Kamkary, 2006), was performed for both groups at the pretest and posttest sessions. Data were analyzed by the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The findings indicated that family-centered psychological interventions can improve the verbal ability of students with Down syndrome. Also, these interventions can enhance the verbal fluid reasoning, verbal knowledge, verbal quantitative reasoning, verbal visual-special process, and verbal working memory of students with Down syndrome (p<.05). Based on the results of this research, family-centered psychological interventions can improve the performance of children with Down syndrome through training the required strategies to the families. Implications of the findings are discussed in the article.