Children’s Seashore House (original) (raw)
Related papers
Implicit Learning in Children and Adults With Williams Syndrome
Developmental Neuropsychology, 2003
In comparison to explicit learning, implicit learning is hypothesized to be a phylogenetically older form of learning that is important in early developmental processes (e.g., natural language acquisition, socialization) and relatively impervious to individual differences in age and IQ. We examined implicit learning in a group of children and adults (9-49 years of age) with Williams syndrome (WS) and in a comparison group of typically developing individuals matched for chronological age. Participants were tested in an artificial-grammar learning paradigm and in a rotor-pursuit task. For both groups, implicit learning was largely independent of age. Both groups showed evidence of implicit learning but the comparison group outperformed the WS group on both tasks. Performance advantages for the comparison group were no longer significant when group differences in working memory or nonverbal intelligence were held constant.
Procedural learning deficit in children with Williams syndrome
Neuropsychologia, 2001
The present study was aimed at evaluating implicit memory processes in subjects with Williams syndrome (WS) and comparing them to mental-age (MA) matched normal children. For this purpose, tests of verbal and visuo-perceptual explicit memory, verbal and visual repetition priming as well as procedural learning tasks were administered to 12 WS and 12 MA matched subjects. WS subjects showed a level of repetition priming similar to that of MA normal controls. In contrast, WS children showed a reduced learning rate in the two procedural tasks. Although deficient explicit memory and executive dysfunction cannot be excluded from the performance of WS subjects, these results suggest a specific deficit of procedural learning in this particular group of mentally retarded children. This finding is relevant for our knowledge about the qualitative aspects of the anomalous cognitive development in mentally retarded people and the neurobiological substrate underlying this development.
Applied Psycholinguistics
Artificial grammar learning is an empirical paradigm that investigates basic pattern and structural processing in different populations. It can inform how higher cognitive functions, such as language use, take place. Our study used artificial grammar learning to assess how children with Williams syndrome (WS; n = 16) extract patterns in structured sequences of synthetic speech, how they compare to typically developing (TD) children (n = 60), and how prosodic cues affect learning. The TD group was divided into a group whose nonverbal abilities were within the range of the WS group, and a group whose chronological age was within the range of the WS group. TD children relied mainly on rule-based generalization when making judgments about sequence acceptability, whereas children with WS relied on familiarity with specific stimulus combinations. The TD participants whose nonverbal abilities were similar to the WS group showed less evidence of relying on grammaticality than TD participant...
Cortex, 2001
presented evidence to suggest that verbal and non-verbal abilities develop at different rates in individuals with the Williams syndrome phenotype. However, this evidence was derived from cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data. The current report presents data from a series of follow up assessments which examine the development of vocabulary and pattern construction abilities in 15 of the original sample of 16 individuals, over a 40 month period. The results confirm the original predictions, as mental age equivalent scores for vocabulary increase more rapidly than scores for the pattern construction test; a finding, which appears unlikely to be due to practice effects.
Asynchrony in the cognitive and lexical development of young children with Williams syndrome
Journal of Child Language, 2005
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.
Memory Abilities in Children with Williams Syndrome
Cortex, 1996
Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic condition characterised by intellectual disability, typical facial dysmorphology and several medical anomalies, A specific neuropsychological profile with a dissociation between language (relatively preserved) and visuo-spatial abilities (more seriously impaired) has been hypothesised in these children, Memory abilities of these patients have not been adequately investigated, although they may substantially contribute to better understanding their neuropsychological profile,