Developmental trajectories of grammatical comprehension in individuals with Williams syndrome

Purser, HRM ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3307-8421, Stojanovik, V, Jarrold, C, Farran, EK, Thomas, MSC and Van Herwegen, J, 2025. Developmental trajectories of grammatical comprehension in individuals with Williams syndrome. First Language, 45 (4), pp. 476-495. ISSN 0142-7237

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Abstract

Despite earlier claims that language abilities are intact in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), many studies have shown that language development is often delayed and atypical, i.e. it develops in line with different cognitive abilities compared to typically developing populations. It is unclear, however, whether general cognitive development predicts language comprehension in WS. The current study is the first to examine the development of grammatical comprehension in a large group (N=58) of individuals with WS aged 5 to 21 years old. Grammatical comprehension is key to a person’s ability to understand what is being said and engage in successful social interaction. Using cross-sectional developmental trajectories, performance on the Test Reception of Grammar (TROG-2) was shown to increase with chronological age and performance was predicted by vocabulary scores, but not non-verbal ability. In addition, there was no meaningful difference between items that contained spatial language and similar grammatical constructions that did not contain spatial language, and performance on both types of expressions was similarly predicted by vocabulary scores. Overall, these results show that grammatical development in WS is delayed but not atypical in its relationship to vocabulary.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	First Language
Creators:	Purser, H.R.M., Stojanovik, V., Jarrold, C., Farran, E.K., Thomas, M.S.C. and Van Herwegen, J.
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Date:	August 2025
Volume:	45
Number:	4
ISSN:	0142-7237
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1177/01427237251326625 DOI 2420050 Other
Rights:	© the author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	02 Apr 2025 08:00
Last Modified:	15 Jan 2026 11:24
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53347

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