The effectiveness of a sentence-building treatment protocol based on Colorful Semantics: Evidence from a Greek-speaking child with Down syndrome.

This article examines the effectiveness of a sentence-building treatment protocol based on Colorful Semantics (CS), a color-coded cueing system designed to enhance sentence construction, applied to a Greek-speaking child with Down syndrome (DS). Using a single-subject design, the study involved assessment, baseline, treatment, post-treatment, and follow-up phases, focusing on eliciting simple subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences through picture-description tasks. Results showed that after two 45-minute treatment sessions, the child significantly improved in producing full SVO sentences independently using the CS protocol, with gains maintained at an eight-week follow-up even without the cueing system. The study highlights the protocol’s short-term efficiency and long-term effects on syntactic abilities, while noting that function words remained largely omitted and that findings are preliminary due to the single-case design. This research contributes detailed clinical procedures for syntactic intervention in Greek-speaking children with DS, addressing a gap in treatment efficacy studies for this population.