The production of figurative language in typically developing children and Williams Syndrome

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 711-716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Naylor ◽  
Jo Van Herwegen
Keyword(s):  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children

scholarly journals Comprehension of novel metaphor in young children with Developmental Language Disorder

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 239694151881722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Bühler ◽  
Alexandra Perovic ◽  
Nausicaa Pouscoulous
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Language Abilities ◽  
Metaphor Comprehension ◽  
Core Deficit ◽  
Language Difficulties ◽  
Everyday Communication

Background and aims Difficulties with aspects of morphosyntax, phonology and/or vocabulary are the hallmark of Development Language Disorder (DLD). Yet, little is known about the linguistic-pragmatic abilities of young children with DLD. Previous studies suggest that children with DLD are experiencing difficulties with idioms, sayings and slang expressions, often interpreting them in a literal or unconventional fashion. However, it is unclear whether this is caused by difficulties to make pragmatic inferences in general or whether it stems from their semantic abilities. We therefore investigated novel metaphor understanding in young children with and without DLD. Methods We assessed novel metaphor comprehension using a reference assignment task with 15 children with DLD diagnoses (ages 42–49 months) as well as typically developing peers matched on chronological age (n = 15) and on language (n = 15). Results Children with DLD performed worse than their age-matched peers but in a comparable manner to the (younger) language-matched typically developing children. Performance was not related to non-verbal intelligence in the children with DLD. Conclusion The findings indicate that young children with DLD have difficulties with metaphor comprehension but also suggest that these difficulties are in line with their general language difficulties and linked to their overall linguistic competence rather than reflecting additional specific issues with deriving pragmatic inferences. Implications Our study adds to a growing body of literature showing that children with low language abilities are also likely to display more difficulties in understanding figurative language independently of any other symptomatology of their clinical diagnosis. It also supports the argument that deficits in the pragmatic domain are a secondary impairment rather than a core deficit in children with DLD. Nonetheless, children with DLD do show difficulties in understanding metaphors. Understanding figurative language is necessary for everyday communication and should therefore be targeted alongside traditional treatments by clinicians treating children with DLD.

Asynchrony in the cognitive and lexical development of young children with Williams syndrome

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
THIERRY NAZZI ◽  
ALISON GOPNIK ◽  
ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Chance Level ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Object Selection ◽  
Object Categories

The present study investigates whether five-to-six-year-old children with Williams syndrome (N=8) can form new object categories based on naming information alone, and compares them with five groups of typically developing children aged 2;0 to 6;0 (N=34 children). Children were presented with triads of dissimilar objects; all objects in a triad were labelled, two of them with the same pseudoname. Name-based categorization was evaluated through object selection. Performance was above chance level for all groups. Performance reached a ceiling at about 4;0 for the typically developing children. For the children with Williams Syndrome, performance remained below chronological age level. The present results are discussed in light of previous findings of a failure to perform name-based categorization in younger children with Williams syndrome and the persistent asynchrony between cognitive and lexical development in this disorder.

Attention allocation to facial expressions of emotion among persons with Williams and Down syndromes

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1189-1197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen J. Goldman ◽  
Cory Shulman ◽  
Yair Bar-Haim ◽  
Rany Abend ◽  
Jacob A. Burack
Keyword(s):  
Down Syndrome ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Attention Capture ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Social Approach ◽  
Mental Age ◽  
Williams Syndrome Group ◽  
Facial Expressions Of Emotion

AbstractIndividuals with Williams syndrome and those with Down syndrome are both characterized by heightened social interest, although the manifestation is not always similar. Using a dot-probe task, we examined one possible source of difference: allocation of attention to facial expressions of emotion. Thirteen individuals with Williams syndrome (mean age = 19.2 years, range = 10–28.6), 20 with Down syndrome (mean age = 18.8 years, range = 12.1–26.3), and 19 typically developing children participated. The groups were matched for mental age (mean = 5.8 years). None of the groups displayed a bias to angry faces. The participants with Williams syndrome showed a selective bias toward happy faces, whereas the participants with Down syndrome behaved similarly to the typically developing participants with no such bias. Homogeneity in the direction of bias was markedly highest in the Williams syndrome group whose bias appeared to result from enhanced attention capture. They appeared to rapidly and selectively allocate attention toward positive facial expressions. The complexity of social approach behavior and the need to explore other aspects of cognition that may be implicated in this behavior in both syndromes is discussed.

Prosodic abilities in Spanish and English children with Williams syndrome: A cross-linguistic study

2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
PASTORA MARTÍNEZ-CASTILLA ◽  
VESNA STOJANOVIK ◽  
JANE SETTER ◽  
MARÍA SOTILLO
Keyword(s):  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Spanish Version ◽  
Speech Communication ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Mental Age ◽  
The Cross

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to compare the prosodic profiles of English- and Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS), examining cross-linguistic differences. Two groups of children with WS, English and Spanish, of similar chronological and nonverbal mental age, were compared on performance in expressive and receptive prosodic tasks from the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech–Communication Battery in its English or Spanish version. Differences between the English and Spanish WS groups were found regarding the understanding of affect through prosodic means, using prosody to make words more prominent, and imitating different prosodic patterns. Such differences between the two WS groups on function prosody tasks mirrored the cross-linguistic differences already reported in typically developing children.

Inflection in Williams Syndrome

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavroula Stavrakaki ◽  
Harald Clahsen
Keyword(s):  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Irregular Word ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Word Forms

This study presents experimental results from elicited production and judgment tasks examining perfective past-tense forms of Greek in seven individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) in comparison to three age groups of typically-developing children. We found that the WS group relied more on the regular (‘sigmatic’) past tense and less on the irregular (‘non-sigmatic’) one than typically-developing children. While for the sigmatic past tense, individuals with WS achieved the same or even higher scores as the controls, they had lower scores on several measures involving non-sigmatic forms and produced more overgeneralizations of sigmatic forms than the controls. We also found developmental changes in the performance of the WS group that were largely parallel to those seen for unimpaired children. Our conclusion is that apart from difficulties accessing irregular word forms in production, the inflectional system of people with WS is unimpaired.

scholarly journals Visuospatial interpolation in typically developing children and in people with Williams Syndrome

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (23-24) ◽  
pp. 2439-2450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Palomares ◽  
Barbara Landau ◽  
Howard Egeth
Keyword(s):  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children
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