Contextual effects on the figurative processing of nouns and verbs in people with Williams syndrome

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are relatively proficient with lexical semantics; however, their contextual integration ability is impaired. Few studies have examined the cause of this deficiency.

This study aimed to examine how people with WS process the integration of lexical words into contexts and determine whether this processing differs across syntactic categories.

Cross-modal tasks with pictures and aurally presented sentences were employed. The semantic appropriateness of target word meanings represented by pictures with context were determined.

People with WS responded to the figurative and literal nouns as appropriate interpretations significantly less often than the chronological age (CA)-matched controls; however, they responded to the literal verbs significantly more often than the mental age (MA)-matched controls. Furthermore, our findings suggest that people with WS displayed weaker contextual integration and asymmetric processing of nouns and verbs.

People with WS were not at the same lexical semantic knowledge developmental level as the CA controls and differed from the MA controls. They used less contextual information when processing syntactic categories compared to the typically developing controls. These might lead to the impaired integration of words into contexts. These findings confirm the neuroconstructivism theory.