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Pegasus staff were pleased to help with some research last month.
Rebecca Rodger, a PhD student from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, is being funded by the Down’s Syndrome Association to complete a study entitled:
‘An investigation of the voice quality of children with Down’s syndrome and its impact on listener judgements’.
The study is researching how we form an opinion of children with Down’s syndrome based on the way their voices sound.
Staff listened to a recording of twenty individual voices, all describing the same picture, and made decisions about the characteristics and personality of the people speaking, including their age, their level of intelligence and whether they were happy or sad, shy or confident. They were not told at the time that half the voices were children with Down’s Syndrome and the other half children without any disabilities.
The research is being used to evaluate whether there are differences between judgments made by education staff in special needs schools and education staff in mainstream schools, and to determine the attitude of children in mainstream education to their peers with Down’s Syndrome. This is particularly relevant at this time of increasing educational and social inclusion for children with Down’s Syndrome.
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