title: Syntax in Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome.
abstract: The syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS) were assessed in different areas (phrase structure, recursion, and bound anaphora). Children were compared to typically-developing peers matched either in chronological age (CA-TD) or in verbal age (VA-TD). In all tasks children with WS performed significantly worse than CA-TD children, but similarly to VA-TD children. However, significant differences were observed in specific domains, particularly regarding sentences with cross-serial dependencies. At the same time, children with WS were less sensitive to syntactic constraints and exhibited a poorer knowledge of some functional words (specifically, of nonreflexive pronouns). A processing bottleneck or a computational constraint may account for this outcome.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Filología Española y sus Didácticas, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Huelva, Avda. de las Fuerzas Armadas s/n., 21071 Huelva, Spain. Electronic address: antonio.benitez@dfesp.uhu.es.
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Benítez-Burraco
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Lingüística General, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain. Electronic address: elena.garayzabal@uam.es.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Garayzábal
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicología, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Oviedo, Plaza Feijoo, s/n., 33003 Oviedo, Spain. Electronic address: fcuetos@uniovi.es.
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Cuetos
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013030:Spain; D018980:Williams Syndrome / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: Binding; Chomsky hierarchy; Computation; Control; Phrase rules; Recursion; Spanish; Syntax; Williams syndrome