Maternal wait time after questions for children with and without Down syndrome

Maternal wait time after open- and closed-ended questions provided during conversation to eight children with Down syndrome (DS) and eight language-age (LA) matched peers was investigated. Analysis of wait time after questions that children did not answer indicated that a longer wait time was provided for LA children (M = 2.5 seconds) than for DS children (M = 1.8 seconds). These wait times were matched well with the children's response times when they did answer questions; LA children taking a mean of 1.9 seconds and DS children a mean of 1.0 seconds to respond. Unlike DS children, LA children took significantly longer to respond when their answers were not topic-related to the maternal question. For both groups, there was no difference in wait times after closed- and open-ended questions and no difference for questions for which joint attention was and was not established.