Intonation abilities of children with Williams syndrome: a preliminary investigation.
OBJECTIVE
The authors investigated expressive and receptive intonation abilities in children with Williams syndrome (WS) and the relation of these abilities to other linguistic abilities.


METHODS
Fourteen children with WS, 14 typically developing children matched to the WS group for receptive language (LA), and 15 typically developing children matched to the WS group for chronological age (CA) were compared on a range of receptive and expressive intonation tasks from the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Child version (PEPS-C) battery.


RESULTS
The WS group performed similarly to the LA group on all intonation tasks apart from the long-item imitation task, on which the WS group scored significantly lower than the LA group. When compared with the CA group, the WS group was significantly poorer on all aspects of intonation. Whereas there were a number of significant correlations between the intonation and language measures in the control groups, in the WS group, there was only 1 significant correlation between a PEPS-C task and one of the language measures.


CONCLUSIONS
As a result of this study, the authors concluded that children with WS have expressive and receptive intonation abilities as expected for their level of language comprehension and that intonation and other linguistic abilities in WS are not strongly related.
Stojanovik
Vesna
V
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading R66 6AL, England. v.stojanovik@reading.ac.uk
Setter
Jane
J
van Ewijk
Lizet
L
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D018980:Williams Syndrome / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology*