Analysis of speech fluency in Williams syndrome.
Picture-story tasks reveal extra hesitations and repeats in Williams syndrome—treat the motor-speech timing, not the content.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rossi et al. (2011) asked people with Williams syndrome to tell a simple picture story.
They compared the speech to mental-age peers without the syndrome.
The team counted hesitations, repetitions, and long pauses during the short talk.
What they found
The Williams group spoke with more stops, repeats, and “um” moments.
Their stories had the same ideas, but the flow was bumpier.
How this fits with other research
Varuzza et al. (2015) looked at writing, not talking, in the same syndrome.
They found that written stories matched mental-age level, but handwriting and spelling lagged.
Together the two papers show: high-level language is spared in Williams syndrome, yet the motor side—speech timing or pencil control—needs support.
Ashworth et al. (2013) and Fyfe et al. (2007) also compared Williams and Down syndromes, but they studied sleep and memory, so they add no direct language data.
Why it matters
When you assess a client with Williams syndrome, separate “what they say” from “how they say it.”
Use an easy picture-story task; if you hear many restarts or long pauses, note speech fluency goals, not cognitive goals.
Target timing, breath, or pacing drills while keeping rich vocabulary lessons—because the ideas are already there.
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Join Free →Pull out a three-card picture sequence, record a one-minute story, and count long pauses or restarts—use the count to decide if fluency drills are needed.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder, often referred as being characterized by dissociation between verbal and non-verbal abilities, although the number of studies disputing this proposal is emerging. Indeed, although they have been traditionally reported as displaying increased speech fluency, this topic has not been fully addressed in research. In previous studies carried out with a small group of individuals with WS, we reported speech breakdowns during conversational and autobiographical narratives suggestive of language difficulties. In the current study, we characterized the speech fluency profile using an ecologically based measure--a narrative task (story generation) was collected from a group of individuals with WS (n = 30) and typically developing group (n = 39) matched in mental age. Oral narratives were elicited using a picture stimulus--the cookie theft picture from Boston Diagnosis Aphasia Test. All narratives were analyzed according to typology and frequency of fluency breakdowns (non-stuttered and stuttered disfluencies). Oral narratives in WS group differed from typically developing group, mainly due to a significant increase in the frequency of disfluencies, particularly in terms of hesitations, repetitions and pauses. This is the first evidence of disfluencies in WS using an ecologically based task (oral narrative task), suggesting that these speech disfluencies may represent a significant marker of language problems in WS.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.05.006