*3.1. Occurrence of Reading Skills in Children with Down Syndrome Aged 6–8*

At T1, the year the children started school, none of the participants were characterized as a reader based on the standardized decoding measure. However, parental data showed that 81.4% of the children recognized at least some written words at this age. An overview of the number of words the children recognized based on parental reports is presented in Table 1.

**Table 1.** Overview of the number of words recognized by the children at T1 based on parental reports.


\* A parent reported that their child could recognize words, but the response to frequency was omitted.

The words recognized were mainly the children's own name, "mum" and "dad" or their family members' first names.

At T2, after one year of school, the proportion of readers was 11.6% on the STAS-OA-1 (α = 0.86), and by 3rd grade (T3), it had increased to 18.6%.

As shown in Table 2, each reader read 2–10 words at T2, corresponding to the use of a logographic and/or phonological decoding strategy. At T3, the range had increased to 2–38 words. However, participant R3 was an outlier; this child's score of 38 was consistent with the normal range for 4th grade (*M* = 39, *SD* = 23), corresponding to the use of an orthographic decoding strategy.

**Table 2.** Number of words on the STAS-OA1 read by each of the individual participants who were classified as readers at T1, T2 and T3.


Note: The values represent the *number* of words read at each time point; R = reader.
