Syntax in Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome

Publication date: Available online 5 March 2016
Source:Journal of Communication Disorders
Author(s): Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Elena Garayzábal, Fernando Cuetos
The syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS) were assessed in different areas (phrase structure, recursion, and bound anaphora). Children were compared to typicallydeveloping peers matched either in chronological age (CA-TD) or in verbal age (VA-TD). In all tasks children with WS performed significantly worse than CA-TD children, but similarly to VA-TD children. However, significant differences were observed in specific domains, particularly regarding sentences with cross-serial dependencies. At the same time, children with WS are less sensitive to syntactic constraints and exhibit a poorer knowledge of some functional words (specifically, of nonreflexive pronouns). A processing bottleneck or a computational constraint may account for this outcome.



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