Syntax and morphology in Williams syndrome
1Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, UK. harald@essex.ac.uk
Cognition
|December 16, 1998
Summary
Children with Williams syndrome (WS) show intact syntax and regular verb endings but struggle with irregular verbs, unlike those with specific language impairment (SLI). This suggests a lexical access issue in WS language development.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Neurodevelopmental Disorders
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by cognitive and language atypicalities.
- WS presents with an unusual pattern of cognitive and linguistic functioning, including deficits in some areas and relative strengths in others.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the specific linguistic profile of morphosyntax in English-speaking children with Williams syndrome.
- To compare the language impairments in WS with those observed in children with specific language impairment (SLI).
- To propose a linguistic characterization of morphosyntactic processing in WS.
Main Methods:
- Case study analysis of four English-speaking subjects with Williams syndrome.
- Assessment of syntactic tasks and inflectional morphology (regular and irregular).
- Comparison of findings with existing data on children with specific language impairment.
Main Results:
- Children with WS demonstrated intact performance on syntactic tasks and regular inflection.
- WS subjects exhibited significant difficulties with irregular inflection, producing numerous errors.
- Children with SLI showed a different pattern, with impaired performance on syntactic tasks and regular inflection.
Conclusions:
- Williams syndrome is characterized by impaired access to specific lexical information, while the core computational system for language remains intact.
- The distinct patterns of impairment in WS and SLI support a theoretical distinction between computational and associative memory systems in language processing.
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