Reading and Phonological Awareness in Williams Syndrome.

Abstract

This article describes the relationship between reading, phonological awareness abilities (PA), and intelligence in a group of 16 individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) and in a group of 16 typically developing children, matched for mental age. The individuals with WS were impaired in passage comprehension, in some areas of PA investigated (syllable deletion and rhyme detection), and in nonword reading accuracy, a measure of grapheme-phoneme conversion. This latter finding is relevant, considering that in Italy regular print-to-sound correspondence is the most practiced teaching routine in the early phases of learning to read.

Lexical-semantic reading in a shallow orthography: evidence from a girl with Williams Syndrome

“…The absence of a contextuality effect even in the case of low frequency words supports the idea that Elisa applies a whole-word lexical reading procedure to all kinds of stimuli. Our findings are consistent with those of Menghini et al (2004), suggesting that WS individuals have difficulties in grapheme-phoneme conversion as demonstrated by their poor performance in nonword reading. Consistent with this view, Majerus (2004) found that WS individuals have poor performance in some meta-phonological awareness tasks (specifically those involving nonwords) suggesting qualitatively different phonological processing in WS.…”

“…However, in nonword reading WS performance was worse than controls', suggesting impairments in grapheme-to-phoneme (g-p) decoding with relatively spared whole-word procedure. To our best knowledge, Temple (2003) and Menghini et al (2004) are the only studies in which lexical and nonlexical reading of WS have been investigated, and both have led to converging conclusions.…”

“…: ''He locked in the jar''; ''but they thinking''), and bi-nuclear sentences, in particular Coordinate clauses (and, or, but) MA: typically developing children matched for mental age Lexical-semantic reading in a shallow orthography 573 words more rapidly and more accurately than nonwords. The use of the reading lexical procedure has been reported in adults and children with WS (Menghini et al, 2004;Temple, 2003). Based on these findings, we expected Elisa to be sensitive to the lexicality of the stimuli, i.e., to be faster and more accurate in reading words than nonwords.…”

“…Temple suggests that this girl has failed to develop both a phonological-decoding reading route and a direct-lexical route (with direct mapping between orthography and phonology) and is reliant upon a partially established lexical-semantic procedure, via which a word's pronunciation can only be activated after its meaning is established. Menghini, Verucci and Vicari (2004) described the reading abilities of a group of Italian-speaking individuals with WS, who showed both accuracy and speed of processing adequate to their cognitive level. In reading single words, exception and homophones, performance of WS individuals was comparable to that of (mental age) controls.…”

Avaliação da consciência fonológica na síndrome de Williams

“…Studies on phonological awareness in individuals with WS have shown that the phonological process plays an important role for the acquisition of reading skills [15][16][17] . Phonological awareness is an intentional reflection on speech that has different levels, i.e., the segmentation of spoken language can happen in different units: a sentence can be segmented in words, words can be segmented in syllables…”