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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2005

THIERRY NAZZI ,
ALISON GOPNIK  and
ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH
THIERRY NAZZI
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, CNRS, Paris, France
ALISON GOPNIK
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA
ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH
Affiliation:
Neurocognitive Development Unit, ICH, London, United Kingdom
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Abstract

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.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , May 2005 , pp. 427 - 438
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This work was supported by a Fullbright fellowship to TN, an MRC Programme Grant and PPP Healthcare grant to AK-S, and NSF grant DLS0132487 to AG. We would like to thank the American Williams Syndrome Association and the Institute of Human Development, UC Berkeley, for making this research materially possible, and the participants and their families for their time and cooperation.