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Spatial language in Williams Syndrome: Evidence for a special interaction?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2007

ÁGNES LUKÁCS ,
CSABA PLÉH  and
MIHÁLY RACSMÁNY
ÁGNES LUKÁCS
Affiliation:
Research Group on Neuropsychology and Psycholinguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences-BUTE and Research Institute of Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
CSABA PLÉH
Affiliation:
Research Group on Neuropsychology and Psycholinguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences-BUTE and Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
MIHÁLY RACSMÁNY
Affiliation:
Research Group on Neuropsychology and Psycholinguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences-BUTE and Department of Psychology, University of Szeged
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Abstract

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension of spatial terms; and (2) a sentence completion task on case markers in their spatial and non-spatial use. The first study showed poorer performance in the WS group, but similar performance patterns and a special difficulty of SOURCE terms in both groups. We did not find overall group differences in the second study. We argue that WS performance patterns reflect WS spatial abilities and seem to be constrained by the same factors in WS as in TD. Results also lead us to conclude that, contrary to most previous claims, there is no selective deficit of spatial terms within WS language, and they also suggest that not all uses of spatial terms require activation of mental models of space.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , May 2007 , pp. 311 - 343
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research reported here owes much to the help and support of the Hungarian Williams Syndrome Association and the devoted help and attention of its leaders, Gábor Pogány and Zsuzsa Bojtor. We are grateful for the enthusiastic help of all the children participating in the studies and for the assistance of their parents. Financial support for the research was provided by OTKA (Hungarian National Science Foundation) T 029514 provided to Csaba Pléh, and F046571 provided to Mihály Racsmány, by an NSF Grant Award No. BCS-0126151 to Ilona Kovács and Csaba Pléh as principal investigators, and an NKFP Hungarian National Research Grant for the project ‘Cognitive and Neural Plasticity’, No. 02151079. Mihály Racsmány and Ágnes Lukács are grantees of the Bolyai János Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Science. Several people read previous versions of the paper and made useful suggestions; we would like to thank them all: Annette Karmiloff-Smith, György Gergely, Michael Thomas, Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Király and Katalin Szentkuti-Kiss.