"We look at space and language and see what goes wrong," Landau explains. "We're looking at the relationship between the children's spatial abilities and language learning--how they talk about space."
It's quite possible, Landau says, "that you could carry on a conversation with a child with Williams Syndrome and not realize that anything is wrong. When they are just chatting, their normal interactions using language are very good. They are so personable, sweet and friendly--and so competent in many ways--that it often covers up the fact that they have a very uneven profile of cognitive abilities."
When tasks involving spatial relationships come into play, however, the limitations of Williams Syndrome become evident.
"When we ask the children to describe direction and motion, they have problems," Landau says. "For example, if a normal child watches a doll jump into a bowl (an animated video event), they might say, 'The doll jumped into the bowl.' But, when a Williams Syndrome child views the same event, they do not describe the event using the same complex verbs and prepositions. Instead, they might say, 'The doll went down.' This simplification may be due to faulty spatial perception (that is, they might not have perceived the event in the same way as the normal child), or it might be faulty language (that is, they might have difficulty learning rich spatial language)."
Most likely, Landau says, "it is some combination of the two. It might be hard to learn to talk about space if you have difficulty conceptualizing it."
Similarly, those with Williams Syndrome have difficulty describing the location
of a dot, relative to a square. Explaining that the dot is above or below the
square isn't easy for them, and they often
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Contact: Beth Thomas
beth.thomas@mvs.udel.edu
302-831-8749
University of Delaware
3-Jul-1998