Linguistic description of sentence production of Spanish speakers with Williams syndrome

Abstract

This paper describes the grammatical complexity and sentence production in spontaneous speech among Spanish-speaking adults with Williams syndrome (WS). The goal is to provide a linguistic description of the typical sentence patterns used by Spanish speakers with WS. A sample of 30 spontaneous speech corpora (16 WS, 14 TD) was collected, transcribed and manually analyzed. The study identifies significant differences between the two groups, particularly in the complexity of syntactic constructions and the discourse production. Results show that WS speakers produce fewer words and significantly fewer complex sentences, such as those involving complementizers, pronominalized objects, or relative clauses. These findings align with prior research, suggesting deficits in working memory, syntactic production, and the manipulation of hierarchical grammatical rules among WS individuals. This study corroborates the notion that while WS individuals often display notable verbal strengths, these coexist with an atypical development of their syntactic capacity.

Keywords

Atypical language development / Clinical linguistics / Sentence / Syntax / Williams syndrome

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Cremades Cortiella Elga: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Juan de Leon Andrea: Writing - original draft, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Lluís Barceló-Coblijn: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Validation, Supervision, Software, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Data curation, Conceptualization.

Funding

This research was funded by the PID2021-128404NA-I00 grant from the MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER, UE.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We thank Clara Soberats for letting us use her corpus. For more information about the Àncora project, visit https://clarasoberats.wixsite.com/investigawilliams (13/06/2025).

Data Availability

The data that has been used is confidential.

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