Gender attribution and gender agreement in French Williams syndrome

Boloh, Yves; Ibernon, Laure; Royer, Stéphanie; Escudier, Frédérique; Danillon, Aurélia

doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2009.07.019

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Third, to infer the gender (or the sex), children with WS focus on the noun, contrary to TD children, who focus more on the determiner. Specifically, the low scores obtained with pseudo-nouns not ending in -o/-a which refer to female drawings are in line with Boloh et al (2009), who found that French children with WS prefer the masculine form. According to Karmiloff-Smith et al (1997), this behaviour suggests that children with WS have learned article–noun pairs by rote, as young TD children also do.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Morphology in Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome

Benítez‐Burraco

Garayzábal²,

Cuetos

2017

Lang. cogn.

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Aims. Morphological skills in Williams syndrome (WS) are a controversial issue, particularly cross-linguistically. Methods. We assessed pluralization patterns of nouns, inflection of verbs in the past, and gender assignment, inflection, and agreement within the noun phrase in a sample of Spanish-speaking children with WS compared to typically developing (TD) children matched on mental age (VA-TD) and on chronological age (CA-TD) age. Results. Children with WS attribute grammatical gender correctly in a production task, but they have problems with inferring the referent’s sex from the gender of the noun in a comprehension task. Additionally, they correctly pluralize nouns and properly inflect regular verbs, but they have problems with irregular verbs. Our findings suggest that they have mastered the productive rules, but they perform like younger children regarding irregular items.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Morphology in Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome

Benítez‐Burraco

Garayzábal²,

Cuetos

2017

Lang. cogn.

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“…Here, arguments have been made that the language of people with WS is structurally different from that of typically developing children, suggesting that an abnormal language system has been constructed . This argument is quite controversial, however, as many others have argued that the system constructed by people with WS is no different in structure from that of unaffected individuals, including syntax, semantics, and morphology …”

Section: The Language Profilementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two studies indicate that adolescents with WS still struggle with the morphology of determiners and adjectives, with one study suggesting that they show error patterns virtually identical to those of much younger children . The evidence on spatial prepositions also suggests some deficits among adolescents and adults with WS.…”

Section: The Language Profilementioning

confidence: 99%

Space and language in Williams syndrome: insights from typical development

Landau

Ferrara

2013

WIRES Cognitive Science

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One of the holy grails of cognitive science is to understand the causal chain that links genes and cognition. Genetic syndromes accompanied by cognitive effects offer natural experiments that can uniquely inform our understanding of this chain. In this article, we discuss the case of Williams syndrome (WS), which is characterized by a set of missing genes on chromosome 7q11.23, and presents with a unique cognitive profile that includes severe spatial impairment along with strikingly fluent and well-structured language. An early inference from this profile was the idea that a small group of genes could directly target one cognitive system while leaving others unaffected. Recent evidence shows that this inference fails. First, the profile within the spatial domain is varied, with relative strength in some aspects of spatial representation but severe impairment in others. Second, some aspects of language may fail to develop fully, raising the question of how to compare the resilience and fragility of the two key cognitive domains in this syndrome. Third, much research on the profile fails to place findings in the context of typical developmental trajectories. We explore these points and propose a new hypothesis that explains the unusual WS cognitive profile by considering normal mechanisms of cognitive development that undergo change on an extremely prolonged timetable. This hypothesis places the elements of the WS cognitive profile in a new light, refocuses the discussion of the gene-cognition causal chain for WS and other disorders, and more generally, underlines the importance of understanding cognitive structure in both typical and atypical development.

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“…However, one could consider that there were a priori reasons to expect those particular differences in both the grammatical gender agreement case and the verbal morphology case. For example, previous production studies (e.g., Boloh, Ibernon, Royer, Escudier, & Danillon, 2009) have shown that WS individuals have difficulties handling gender agreement. However, although in the predicted direction, the difference between WS participants' scores (.50) and seven-year-olds' ones (.71) for the gender agreement item (GA2: La fourmi *gris est *petit, grammatical version: La fourmi grise est petite.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, WS seem to have general difficulties with relational concepts, including temporal concepts, and not only spatial ones (Mervis & John, 2008). Also, French WS have been shown to have lasting difficulties handling grammatical gender agreement during production, although the reasons for this are currently opened to various interpretations (Boloh et al, 2009). It might therefore be tempting to point out that metasyntactic abilities in WS could only yield poor outcomes as long as they were made to operate on weak areas of language.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%