School of Foreign Languages, Laboratory for Language Pathology and Developmental Neurosciences, Hunan University, Lushan Road (S), Yuelu District, Changsha 410082, Hunan Province, China.
Res Dev Disabil. 2023 Mar;134:104429. doi: 10.1016/j.ridd.2023.104429. Epub 2023 Jan 24.
People with Williams syndrome (WS) are relatively proficient with lexical semantics; however, their contextual integration ability is impaired. Few studies have examined the cause of this deficiency.
This study aimed to examine how people with WS process the integration of lexical words into contexts and determine whether this processing differs across syntactic categories.
Cross-modal tasks with pictures and aurally presented sentences were employed. The semantic appropriateness of target word meanings represented by pictures with context were determined.
People with WS responded to the figurative and literal nouns as appropriate interpretations significantly less often than the chronological age (CA)-matched controls; however, they responded to the literal verbs significantly more often than the mental age (MA)-matched controls. Furthermore, our findings suggest that people with WS displayed weaker contextual integration and asymmetric processing of nouns and verbs.
People with WS were not at the same lexical semantic knowledge developmental level as the CA controls and differed from the MA controls. They used less contextual information when processing syntactic categories compared to the typically developing controls. These might lead to the impaired integration of words into contexts. These findings confirm the neuroconstructivism theory.
威廉姆斯综合征（WS）患者在词汇语义方面相对熟练，但语境整合能力受损。很少有研究探讨这种缺陷的原因。
本研究旨在考察 WS 患者如何将词汇词整合到语境中，并确定这种处理是否因句法类别而异。
采用图片和听觉呈现句子的跨模态任务。通过带有语境的图片来确定目标词意义的语义适宜性。
WS 患者对隐喻和字面名词的恰当解释的反应频率明显低于年龄匹配对照组（CA）；然而，他们对字面动词的反应频率明显高于心理年龄（MA）匹配对照组。此外，我们的发现表明，WS 患者表现出较弱的语境整合和名词与动词的不对称处理。
WS 患者的词汇语义知识发展水平与 CA 对照组不同，与 MA 对照组也不同。与典型发育对照组相比，他们在处理句法类别时使用的上下文信息较少。这可能导致单词无法融入语境。这些发现证实了神经建构主义理论。
