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Syntax and morphology in Williams syndrome

H Clahsen1, M Almazan

  • 1Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, UK. harald@essex.ac.uk

Cognition
|December 16, 1998
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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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).

Related Experiment Videos

  • 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.