We investigated whether individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) produce language with a bias towards statistical properties of word combinations rather than grammatical rules, resulting in an overuse of holistically stored, familiar phrases. We analysed continuous speech samples from English children with WS (n = 12), typically developing (TD) controls matched on chronological age (n = 15) and TD controls matched on language age (n = 14). Alongside word count, utterance length, grammatical complexity, and morphosyntactic errors, we measured familiarity of expressions by computing collocation strength of each word combination. The WS group produced stronger collocations than both control groups. Moreover, the WS group produced fewer complex sentences, shorter utterances, and more frequent function words than chronological-age matched controls. Language in WS may appear more typical than it is because familiar, holistically processed expressions mask grammatical and other difficulties.

中文翻译：

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威廉姆斯综合症患者过度使用熟悉的短语掩盖了语言处理的差异


我们调查了患有威廉姆斯综合症（WS）的人所使用的语言是否偏向于单词组合的统计特性而不是语法规则，从而导致过度使用整体存储的熟悉短语。我们分析了患有 WS 的英国儿童 (n = 12) 的连续语音样本，其中典型的是与实际年龄相匹配的发育 (TD) 对照 (n = 15) 和与语言年龄相匹配的 TD 对照 (n = 14)。除了字数、话语长度、语法复杂性和形态句法错误之外，我们还通过计算每个单词组合的搭配强度来衡量表达的熟悉程度。 WS 组比两个对照组产生了更强的搭配。此外，与年龄匹配的对照组相比，WS 组产生的复杂句子更少、话语更短、功能词更频繁。 WS 中的语言可能看起来比实际情况更典型，因为熟悉的、经过整体处理的表达式掩盖了语法和其他困难。