Paralinguistic abilities of adults with intellectual disability

The aim of this research was to determine the ability level of paralinguistic production and comprehension in adults with intellectual disability (ID) with regard to the level of their intellectual functioning and presence of co-morbid psychiatric conditions or dual diagnosis (DD). The sample consisted of 120 participants of both genders, ranging in age between 20 and 56 years (M=31.82, SD=8.702). Approximately 50% of the sample comprised participants with a co-existing psychiatric condition. Each of these two sub-samples (those with ID only and those with DD) consisted of 25 participants with mild ID and 35 participants with moderate ID. The paralinguistic scale from The Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo; Sacco et al., 2008) was used to assess the abilities of comprehension and production of paralinguistic elements. The results showed that the participants with mild ID are more successful than the participants with moderate ID both in paralinguistic comprehension tasks (p=.000) and in paralinguistic production tasks (p=.001). Additionally, the results indicated the presence of separate influences of both ID levels on all of the paralinguistic abilities (F [116]=42.549, p=.000) and the existence of DD (F [116]=18.215, p=.000).