16.2186, Review: Lang Acquisitio n/Neuroling: Bartke & Siegm üller

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2186. Sun Jul 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2186, Review: Lang Acquisition/Neuroling: Bartke & Siegmüller

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1)
Date: 14-Jul-2005
From: Alona Soschen < soschen at mit.edu,career2002 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Williams Syndrome across Languages 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 15:26:47
From: Alona Soschen < soschen at mit.edu,career2002 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Williams Syndrome across Languages 
 

EDITORS: Bartke, Susanne; Siegmüller, Julia 
TITLE: Williams Syndrome across Languages
SERIES: Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 36
PUBLISHER:  John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004 
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2080.html


Alona Soschen, Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy, and Brain 
and Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This book focuses on the cross-linguistic aspects of language 
development and language competence in Williams syndrome (WS). 
Emphasis is given to the relationship between language and cognitive 
abilities.  Due to a deletion in chromosome band 7q11.23, subjects 
with WS have neuro-developmental deficits, including deficits in global 
processing. People with WS are usually characterized by hyper-
sociability and heightened affect. Language skills are relatively 
sparse, along with some non-verbal skills such as facial recognition. 

The book consists of a series of 14 articles, collected and 
concentrated on the current interdisciplinary research on WS. It 
begins with introduction of the phenotype of WS individuals. 
Siegmüller and Bartke (Williams syndrome from a clinical perspective) 
describe in detail the physiological, social, cognitive, and neuro-
physiological characteristics of WS. An essential part of the discussion 
of the link between phenotype and genotype, and review of the 
current research on brain characteristics in WS is discussed. This 
chapter is an excellent introduction and summary of what is known 
about WS to date. It reviews the clinical aspects of WS as described in 
the 60's, up to current methods of diagnosis.

Grzeschik (Genetics of Williams-Beuren syndrome) provides insights 
into the molecular genetic basis of the syndrome. Grzeschik 
concentrates on the deletion of particular mega bases from 
chromosome 7q11.23 as a cause for individual WS-symptoms, and 
supplies information concerning the effects of this deletion on genes. 
Grzeschik reviews the recent research on the WS-homologous 
genomic region in the mouse, and concludes that further studies with 
animal models for WS addressing other candidate genes are required 
to help in human gene mapping.

Mervis, Robinson, Rowe, Becerra, and Klein-Tasman (Relations 
between language and cognition in Williams syndrome) address the 
relationship of general control processes to the intellectual abilities of 
people with WS. Correlational analyses are used to consider the 
relations between language and cognition in school children and 
adults. The discussion of the initial stage of language acquisition leads 
to the conclusion that in general, it proceeds in the same manner as in 
TD (typically developing) individuals. However, WS individuals rely 
more on verbal short-term memory than their TD peers. 

The idea that language and cognition cannot be regarded separately 
is supported in the Schaner-Wolles' article Spared domain-specific 
cognitive capacities, syntax and morphology in Williams and Down 
syndromes. This article compares an unimpaired development to WS 
and to DS language acquisition, and offers the answer to a question 
whether this development is guided by domain-specific or domain-
general cognitive capacities. The study is based on one child with WS 
and 82 children with DS. It is concluded that in both, certain interactive 
subsystems involved in language processing are spared - an 
argument in favor of their modular character.  The link between 
language and cognition is established by showing that the linguistic 
system can be deprived of the necessary support for language 
acquisition because of syndrome-specific cognitive limitations. 

Phonological processing in Williams syndrome by Steve Majerus 
concentrates on the effect of complex phonological representations in 
French-speaking children with WS. He argues that although basic 
phonological processes such as identification, segmentation, short-
term storage and articulation of phonological information appear to be 
at a regular level, this performance is achieved atypically, in the sense 
that phonological representations in WS are more specific than in 
typically developing children. 

Böhning, Starke and Weissenborn in their article Fast mapping in 
Williams syndrome examine the data of vocabulary acquisition, in 
German, by one child with WS, and four groups of ND controls 
matched for chronological, lexical, and syntactic age.  They argue that 
the acoustic capacities are different in WS due to over-detailed 
phonological memory representations, while the mechanisms of 
linguistic performance are the same as in TD controls.

Volterra, Capirci, and Vicari (Language in preschool Italian children 
with Williams and Down syndromes) present the studies of 
communicative and linguistic abilities in Italian speaking children with 
DS and with WS, and compare the results of more recent 
developments in the investigation of early language acquisition for 
these two syndromes. The authors discuss the development of 
morphology, syntax, and vocabulary.  They confirm that although a 
spared ability of children with WS to hear and store speech sounds 
accounts for a relatively intact language capacity - in contrast with 
what is found in DS - children with WS do not speak like their TD 
peers. The differences between WS and DS language acquisition and 
TD language development are viewed as related to the general 
cognitive impairment rather than to a specific syndrome.

Lucács, Pléh, and Racsmány's article Language in Hungarian children 
with Williams syndrome addresses the issue of the WS mental lexicon 
and grammar. The authors present four studies that show in WS 
patients language lags behind verbal age, while organization does 
not. However, the results are not taken as evidence that language in 
WS corresponds to that in TD; there is a need for more fine-grained 
studies of representation, processing, and language acquisition. 

Clahsen, Ring, and Temple (Lexical and morphological skills in 
English-speaking children with Williams syndrome) confirm that in WS 
the rules-based system for language is selectively spared, while the 
access to lexical representations is impaired. This modular approach 
is supported by the results of the study of morphology (particularly 
past-tense formation) and comparative adjective formation, as well as 
lexical skills, in WS children and closely matched typically developing 
participants.

Regular and irregular inflectional morphology in German Williams 
syndrome by Penke and Krause presents data from German to 
provide an explanation for the selective deficit with irregular inflected 
forms. According to Penke and Krause, WS subjects have difficulty 
accessing the sub nodes where irregular inflected forms are stored. 
This accounts for both the selective deficit with irregular forms and the 
over regularization with regular affixes to irregular verbs and nouns. 
The data also suggests that the language system is affected by other 
deficits as well.  

In her study of Hebrew speaking toddlers (Emergent linguistic 
competence in children with Williams syndrome), Yonata Levy 
explores the development of grammar in WS children. She suggests 
that because the error rates in acquisition of complex clauses as well 
as percent of usage of noun complement construction were within the 
range of TD controls, the developmental pattern in WS should not be 
interpreted as atypical. 

Stavrakaki (Wh-questions in Greek children with Williams syndrome) 
investigates the performance of Greek children with WS in the 
production of referential and non-referential wh-questions. The study 
compares the results to the performance of SLI (specifically language 
impaired) and typically developing children. The results show that both 
the WS and TD subjects have a high level of performance, while the 
SLI subjects have severe deficits with wh-question formation.

Siegmüller and Weissenborn (The comprehension of complex wh-
questions in German -speaking individuals with WS) tackle the 
question whether WS-individuals can achieve adult-like grammatical 
competence. Siegmüller and Weissenborn found that WS competence 
corresponds to the stages of unimpaired linguistic development. They 
also state that German-speaking individuals with WS have difficulties 
with adjunct-questions as compared to the controls. They conclude 
that the WS-individuals' learning mechanisms are more sensitive to 
predictable patterns in the input, such as formed by the verb and its 
complement.

Bartke (Passives in German children with WS) reports findings in 
passive acquisition, which show that WS children are able to analyze 
syntactic regularities and use linguistic rules. She concludes that 
language development in WS may be interpreted in terms of a delay 
rather than a deviation from the norm. 

EVALUATION

In this review I have provided a brief summary of each article of the 
volume. Most of the papers are well organized and very readable, 
ending with a short summary convincingly illustrating the main 
argument of the article. The experiments are described in a very 
accessible way.  There are almost no unnecessary technical terms 
and/or tables. However, Grzeschik's article abounds in narrowly 
specialized terminology relevant to the studies of genetics and 
requires a glossary. 

As an all-embracing review of work on language acquisition in Williams 
syndrome, this book brings together the results of experiments in 
seven different languages with participation of various age groups. 
This represents two of the major strengths of this anthology. It also 
compares language acquisition in WS and Down syndrome, and 
draws important conclusions.

A valuable contribution of this book to the field of science is its 
unbiased theoretical approach that allowing the authors to express a 
variety of viewpoints. This collection supports the idea that adherence 
to modularity hypothesis should not prevent researchers from 
investigating language as a part of a more general cognitive system 
which can be deprived of the necessary support for language 
acquisition in WS. This work is an important step forward in the 
development of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language 
development and of the human mind in general. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Alona Soschen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of 
Linguistics and Philosophy and the Department of Cognitive Science, 
MIT, a leading center for research on formal models of human 
language and the interrelations between linguistics, psychology, 
philosophy, and mathematics. Her interests include language 
acquisition, studies of concept formation, syntactic theories, and 
comparative syntax (Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Semitic). Her 
present work focuses on the Minimalist program, and combines a 
cognitively based approach to minimal syntactic representations and 
acquisition of syntax with the analyses implemented by means of 
formal logic.





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