Grammatical gender vs. natural gender in French Williams syndrome.
This article reports grammatical gender attribution scores in French Williams participants (N=28, mean chronological age=15.1) in an experiment similar to the classic one from Karmiloff-Smith (1979) where grammatical gender was pitted against natural gender. WS participants massively opted for the masculine gender as the default one, just as MA-controls did. They differed from CA-controls, however, in that they provided fewer sex-based responses. Splitting the WS group into two subgroups did not reveal a shift to sex-based responses similar to the one found in controls. It is argued that this latter difference could plausibly be related to differences in cognitive, lexical or meta-linguistic abilities.
Ibernon
Laure
L
Department of Psychology, University of Picardie Jules Verne, Chemin du Thil, 80025 Amiens, France.
Boloh
Yves
Y
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D014825:Vocabulary; D018980:Williams Syndrome / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult