Communicating Friendship: A Language Sample Analysis of Peer Conversations Between Children With and Without Down Syndrome

Reciprocal friendships are central to children’s well-being and participation, yet little is known about how long-standing friendships are enacted through conversation between children with and without communication disorders. To explore how children with Down syndrome (DS) and their non-Down syndrome (NDS) friends sustain such cross-neurotype friendships through conversation, a combination of quantitative and qualitative discourse analytic approaches was used to explore video-recorded free-play sessions in two long-standing reciprocal friendship dyads: one aged 8 (DS/NDS-8) and one aged 12 years (DS/NDS-12). Analysis used the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) combined with Discourse Analysis to examine how core characteristics of friendship: companionship, affection, guidance/advice-giving, reassurance of worth, emotional support and shared history are enacted in their conversations despite differences in linguistic resources. Results suggest these conversations provide rich, ecologically valid evidence of communicative competence that can be used to support friendship development and the social inclusion of children with language disorders.