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A story description task was used to elicit short stories by 10 Italian children and adolescents with Down's syndrome and 10 normal children matched on mean length of utterance (MLU). Data analysis focused on a subset of lexical, morphological and syntactic aspects of language use. The results show that the subjects with Down's syndrome and their normal matches use a similar lexical repertoire. However, the two groups differ with respect to omissions of free morphemes, and some aspects of syntactic and pragmatic abilities. These data on Italian subjects corroborate and extend previous findings on other languages: despite an extensive repertoire of lexical and grammatical items, subjects with Down's syndrome seem unable to use such elements appropriately and consistently across contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes (H-HSs: those that represent how objects are handled or manipulated) and object handshapes (O-HSs: those that represent the class, size, or shape of objects) express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language (ASL) and Italian Sign Language (LIS) productions are compared (adults and children) as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in each country using "silent gesture." While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants (signers and gesturers) used iconic handshapes (H-HSs and O-HSs together) more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one (i.e., H-HSs associated with no-agent descriptions and O-HSs associated with agentive ones). These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions-that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type., (Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

Persons with trisomy 21 (T21) and Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS) have different brain abnormalities which may affect manual laterality. We assessed 45 persons with T21 and 34 with WBS (mean age 13) and 81 typically developing children (TD). Manual laterality was assessed with a fifteen-item task administered two times, and Bishop's card-reaching task. We found more left-handers in the T21 group compared to the other two groups. Inconsistent laterality was higher in the two groups with genetic diseases than in the TD group. For Bishop's test, both T21 and WBS participants were less right-oriented than the TD group. They displayed different response patterns in midline crossing when reaching for the cards, but did not display more midline crossing inhibition than the TD group. Is atypical handedness linked to specific genetic syndromes and, more specifically for persons with T21, to the trisomy of some of the genes?

Important claims have been made regarding the contrasting profiles of linguistic and cognitive performance observed in two genetically based syndromes, Williams syndrome (WS) and Down syndrome (DS). Earlier studies suggested a double dissociation, with language better preserved than nonverbal cognition in children and adults with WS, and an opposite profile in children and adults with DS. More recent studies show that this initial characterization was too simple, and that qualitatively different patterns of deficit observed within both language and visual-spatial cognition, in both groups. In the present study, large samples of children and adolescents with WS and age-matched DS are compared with typically developing (TD) controls matched to WS in mental age, on receptive and expressive lexical and grammatical abilities, semantic and phonological fluency, digit span and nonverbal visual-spatial span, and on 2 visual-spatial construction tasks. Study 1 confirmed distinct profiles of sparing and impairment for the 2 groups, within as well as between language and nonlinguistic domains, even after IQ variations were controlled. In Study 2 we compared performance of the children, adolescents and young adults with DS and WS included in the first study, divided on the basis of the chronological age of the participants (under 8 years; over 12 years). Although it is important to stress that these are cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data, the results demonstrated that the profile of younger children is different in respect to those of the older children; initial states of the system cannot be inferred by the final state. Possible neural substrates for these profiles and trajectories are discussed.

Previous studies of linguistic and memory abilities in Italian-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS) and Down syndrome (DS)are briefly reviewed. New data on linguistic performance of 6 Italian children with WS between 3 and 6 years of age are presented and compared with data on linguistic performance of 6 children with DS selected from a larger sample and matched for chronological age and vocabulary size and of 6 typically developing (TD) younger children matched for mental age and vocabulary size. The language measures also included a parent report of early phrase structure, a naming test, and a sentence repetition task. Analyses revealed that the 3 groups of children were at the same productive vocabulary level, but showed different patterns in sentence production and repetition. Children with WS produced more complete sentences, similar to TD children at the same vocabulary size, whereas children with DS produced more telegraphic and incomplete sentences. The difference between children with DS and those with WS was more marked on the repetition task, suggesting that phonological short-term memory may play a greater role when sentence production is measured through repetition. In addition, qualitative analysis of errors produced in the repetition test revealed interesting differences among the 3 groups. These results from younger children confirm and extend previous findings with older children and adolescents with WS. They further suggest that the apparently spared linguistic abilities of children with WS could emerge as an artifact of comparisons made to children with DS, whose sentence production competence is more compromised relative to other verbal and nonverbal abilities.

Recent studies on subjects with Williams syndrome (WS) have revealed a particular facility for language, rarely observed in other mental retarded populations, inspiring much belief in the independence of language from cognition. Lexical and morphosyntactic abilities of 17 Italian WS individuals, between 4.10 and 15.3 years of age, were evaluated both in comprehension and production and compared with those of normally developing Italian children. WS subjects look similar to normal controls in lexical comprehension, but they appear to perform more poorly in grammatical comprehension. Furthermore they look deviant from normals in some morphosyntactic aspects of their production. They perform better than normal controls only with respect to phonological fluency, when semantic aspects are not involved. Our data show very little evidence for a dissociation between language and cognition.

The authors report a longitudinal study of the first stages of cognitive, communicative and linguistic development of six Italian-speaking infants with unilateral brain lesions acquired before the point at which language acquisition normally would begin. Substantial variability was observed in the language-cognition profiles displayed by these children. To unify these diverse profiles, the authors propose a 'cognitive infrastructure' or 'threshold' model of early language development, in which the appearance of speech depends on the presence of certain cognitive prerequisites; once those are in place, some degree of dissociation between linguistic and cognitive development can be observed. The contribution of neurological factors to these profiles appears to be complex, suggesting an interaction between lesion site, lesion size and the presence of seizure disorders and/or anticonvulsant drugs.

The use of Italian morphology was examined in 34 children ranging in age from 2;6 to 5;0. By the age of 3;6-4;0, high percentages of use in obligatory contexts were seen for a number of grammatical morphemes. Children age 2;6-3;0 showed percentages of use that were somewhat lower than those seen for the older children. In this age range, singular forms were used with higher percentages in obligatory contexts than plural forms, for several different types of grammatical morphemes. Greater control over singular forms in these younger children was corroborated by data from a comprehension task. Even at the younger ages studied, use of grammatical morphemes did not seem influenced by whether phonological cues to agreement were present, or whether the grammatical morphemes were homonymous. Percentages for grammatical morphemes in the form of free-standing morphemes were somewhat lower than percentages for morphemes taking the form of inflections, suggesting that the obligatory nature of inflections in Italian may be a more influential factor than the amount of morphological information contained in a grammatical morpheme.

A common profile in English-speaking specifically language-impaired children is a moderate deficit across a broad range of linguistic features and a more marked, selective impairment in using bound morphemes and components of the verb system. To gain a clearer understanding of the nature of these more serious problems, we examined the speech of monolingual Italian-speaking as well as English-speaking children with specific language impairment. The evidence suggested that phonological factors contributed significantly to these children's extraordinary problems with particular linguistic features. Contrary to expectations, other marked deficits seemed more related to the opacity of the rules involved and homonymity with other morphemes than to problems with formal grammatical devices in general or components of the verb system in particular.