Overuse of familiar phrases by individuals with Williams syndrome masks differences in language processing

Abstract

We investigated whether individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) produce language with a bias towards statistical properties of word combinations rather than grammatical rules, resulting in an overuse of holistically stored, familiar phrases. We analysed continuous speech samples from English children with WS (n = 12), typically developing (TD) controls matched on chronological age (n = 15) and TD controls matched on language age (n = 14). Alongside word count, utterance length, grammatical complexity, and morphosyntactic errors, we measured familiarity of expressions by computing collocation strength of each word combination. The WS group produced stronger collocations than both control groups. Moreover, the WS group produced fewer complex sentences, shorter utterances, and more frequent function words than chronological-age matched controls. Language in WS may appear more typical than it is because familiar, holistically processed expressions mask grammatical and other difficulties.