Syntactic abilities in Williams Syndrome: How intact is ‘intact’?

The present paper investigates the syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with Williams Syndrome to explore the debates surrounding the dissociation between language and cognition as well as possible dissociations within the language module in this population. Experimental linguistic measures that assess interpretation of passives, pronouns and reflexives as well as elicitation and comprehension of whquestions were employed. Overall results for the WS group reveal little evidence of the reported spared linguistic abilities in this population thus challenging the idea of a relatively intact language system in WS. Background assumptions and aims Neuro-developmental disorders like Williams Syndrome (WS) have been shown to present with a non-linear relationship between cognitive and linguistic abilities, showing better performance in language relative to cognition (Bellugi, Wang & Jernigan 1994, Clahsen & Almazan 1998). This has been used as evidence for a dissociation between language and cognition. WS has also been used to support the existence of submodular dissociations within the language faculty. It has been reported that individuals with WS perform better on grammatical tasks (passives, negation, interpretation of reflexives and pronouns, conditionals, formation of regular past tense and plurals) compared with tasks involving lexical processing (irregular past tense and plurals) (Bellugi et al. 1994, Clahsen & Almazan 1998, 2001). However, the claims about both kinds of modularity evidenced in WS have not gone unchallenged. Whilst many researchers would agree that the linguistic abilities of individuals with WS are in advance of their cognitive skills (Mervis et al. 2004, among others), the claim of relatively intact linguistic processing has been contested by researchers that present evidence for impaired morphosyntactic abilities along with other linguistic and nonlinguistic abilities (Karmiloff-Smith et al. 1997, among others). Also, there is currently a heated debate on whether any intra-linguistic dissociations exist in WS (Thomas et al. 2001). In an attempt to further explore the debates surrounding WS, Joffe and Varlokosta (under review) report preliminary new results (from a larger onITRW on Experimental Linguistics