FRONTAL-LOBE FUNCTION AND EXECUTIVE SKILLS IN CHILDREN WITH TURNERS-SYNDROME

Children with Turner's syndrome (TS), a sex chromosome abnormality in which the second X chromosome is abnormal or deleted, were given a ser ies of tasks that investigated executive skills traditionally consider ed to be subserved by the frontal lobes. The children with TS showed s ignificant deficits in comparison to controls but the effects were tas k specific. They were impaired on the Stroop, Verbal Fluency and the a bstract version of the Self-Ordered Pointing task. However, performanc e was entirely normal on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the Tower of London and the concrete version of the Self-Ordered Pointing task. Th ese results support the fraction-ability of executive control processe s in development, thereby contradicting Fodor's (1983) conception of t he absence of modularity in such systems. The phenotype-genotype relat ion for 45,XO TS differed significantly from that of other karyotypes on the Self-Ordered Pointing task, confirming the distinctive nature o f aspects of the cognitive development of children with TS associated with differing etiological genotypes.