The drawings of children and young people with Down's syndrome: a case of delay or difference?

This study compared the performance of 29 children and young people with Down's Syndrome with the performance of 29 verbal-mental-age-matched children without learning difficulties on four drawing tasks and four picture-selection tasks. All eight tasks involved the graphic depiction of a perceptually-present array in which one object was partially occluded by another object. It was found that all participants performed better on the picture-selection tasks than on the drawing tasks, and that the individuals with Down's Syndrome performed significantly worse than the children without learning difficulties on all eight tasks. However, it was also found that the performance of the children without learning difficulties correlated strongly with their verbal mental age, but that the performance of the individuals with Down's Syndrome did not show the same correlation with verbal mental age. Other systematic differences between the drawings of the individuals with Down's Syndrome and those of the children without learning difficulties also occurred. The findings suggest that the drawing development of children and young people with Down's Syndrome may not just be delayed relative to that of children who do not have learning difficulties but may exhibit a qualitatively different pattern.