Morphological patterns in Hungarian children with Williams syndrome and the rule debates

Williams syndrome (WMS), a rare neurogenetic disorder, has been in the forefront of research in cognitive psychology for the last 10 years. Studies of grammatical development in 14 Hungarian WMS children are presented: they were examined on tasks testing regular and irregular morphology; measures of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain and language 2003-09, Vol.86 (3), p.377-383
Main Authors: PLEH, Csaba, LUKACS, Agnes, RACSMANY, Mihaly
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child clinical studies
Child, Preschool
Female
Humans
Language development
Language Disorders - complications
Language Disorders - diagnosis
Lexicon
Linguistics - methods
Male
Medical sciences
Memory Disorders - diagnosis
Memory Disorders - etiology
Morphology
Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Rules
Vocabulary
Williams syndrome
Williams Syndrome - complications
Working memory
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Summary:Williams syndrome (WMS), a rare neurogenetic disorder, has been in the forefront of research in cognitive psychology for the last 10 years. Studies of grammatical development in 14 Hungarian WMS children are presented: they were examined on tasks testing regular and irregular morphology; measures of digit span were also obtained. Results on the production of accusative and plural forms confirmed for Hungarian that regardless of the frequency of the item, inflected forms of irregulars are harder to produce, and often regularized in WMS, revealing a dissociation between the rules of grammar vs. the mental lexicon. Overall performance on the morphology task is associated with the capacity of phonological short-term memory: subjects with higher span perform better on both tasks. The specification of the surprisingly close relation of phonological short-term memory with the linguistic measures awaits further study.
ISSN:0093-934X
1090-2155
DOI:10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00537-0