Abnormal processing of emotional prosody in Williams syndrome: an event-related potentials study.
Williams syndrome flattens early brain responses to emotional tone, so clients may miss how you feel even when they hear what you say.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team recorded brain waves while people with Williams syndrome listened to happy, angry, or neutral voices. They watched three early peaks: N100, P200, and N300. These peaks show how fast the brain hears and labels feeling in tone.
A control group without Williams syndrome did the same task. All participants sat still and pressed a button when they heard a beep. No training or teaching was given.
What they found
The Williams group had a smaller N100, a bigger P200, and a missing N300. This pattern means the brain hears the sound but mis-times the emotional label.
Controls showed the normal up-down-up wave. The odd timing in Williams syndrome happened early, before conscious thought.
How this fits with other research
Grindle et al. (2012) also tested Williams syndrome, but with paper tests instead of brain waves. They saw low scores on every language sub-test. The ERP study now shows why: the first auditory step is already off beat.
Libero et al. (2016) tracked the same kids for three years. Their vocabulary words grew quickly, yet sentence and pragmatic skills lagged. The early ERP mismatch helps explain this split—kids hear words but miss the feeling that carries meaning.
Calet et al. (2019) found similar prosody problems in children with dyslexia. Both groups struggle with phrase-level tune, hinting that timing glitches in auditory brain areas may cross diagnoses.
Why it matters
If you assess a child with Williams syndrome, do not trust clear single-word replies. Check if they catch sarcasm, warning, or praise in your tone. Add simple listening drills that pair a feeling word with a voice clip. Target the N100-P200 window: present the sound again after a one-second gap so the brain gets a second chance to register the emotional beat.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Play three short voice clips—happy, angry, neutral—then ask the client to hand you the matching face card; repeat with a one-second pause between clips to give the brain a second beat.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder due to a microdeletion in chromosome 7, is described as displaying an intriguing socio-cognitive phenotype. Deficits in prosody production and comprehension have been consistently reported in behavioral studies. It remains, however, to be clarified the neurobiological processes underlying prosody processing in WS. This study aimed at characterizing the electrophysiological response to neutral, happy, and angry prosody in WS, and examining if this response was dependent on the semantic content of the utterance. A group of 12 participants (5 female and 7 male), diagnosed with WS, with age range between 9 and 31 years, was compared with a group of typically developing participants, individually matched for chronological age, gender and laterality. After inspection of EEG artifacts, data from 9 participants with WS and 10 controls were included in ERP analyses. Participants were presented with neutral, positive and negative sentences, in two conditions: (1) with intelligible semantic and syntactic information; (2) with unintelligible semantic and syntactic information ('pure prosody' condition). They were asked to decide which emotion was underlying the auditory sentence. Atypical event-related potentials (ERP) components were related with prosodic processing (N100, P200, N300) in WS. In particular, reduced N100 was observed for prosody sentences with semantic content; more positive P200 for sentences with semantic content, in particular for happy and angry intonations; and reduced N300 for both types of sentence conditions. These findings suggest abnormalities in early auditory processing, indicating a bottom-up contribution to the impairment in emotional prosody processing and comprehension. Also, at least for N100 and P200, they suggest the top-down contributions of semantic processes in the sensory processing of speech. This study showed, for the first time, that abnormalities in ERP measures of early auditory processing in WS are also present during the processing of emotional vocal information. This may represent a physiological signature of underlying impaired on-line language and socio-emotional processing.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2010.09.011