Françoise, a fifteen-year follow up

A fifteen-year follow up of the linguistic and cognitive profile of a woman, named Françoise, with standard trisomy 21. She had been studied in considerable detail between 1987 and 1991 by Rondal (1995) and found to have exceptionally good language abilities in advance of regular cognitive abilities for a person with Down syndrome. Françoise's psychological functioning has been deteriorating relatively rapidly over the last two years. A severe deterioration of her previously excellent receptive language abilities is documented in the present study. Productively, her on-line word finding is becoming problematic, mean length of utterance has halved compared with 15 years ago, and production of compound sentences is reduced. However, basic phonological and morphosyntactic skills are preserved. Françoise's changing profile during the latter years seems to mirror that documented in the first stages of Alzheimer disease in ageing adults in the general population.