Asynchrony in the cognitive and lexical development of young children with Williams syndrome.
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.
Nazzi
Thierry
T
Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, CNRS, Paris, France. thierry.nazzi@univ-paris5.fr
Gopnik
Alison
A
Karmiloff-Smith
Annette
A
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D014825:Vocabulary; D018980:Williams Syndrome / Q000453:epidemiology*