Narrative as a social engagement tool: The excessive use of evaluation in narratives from children with Williams syndrome

Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder characterized by a unique phys iological and behavioral profile, involving excessive sociability and relat ively spared linguistic abilities in spite of mild to moderate mental retar dation. The present study examines the narrative development of children wi th Williams syndrome and, for the first time, compares their performance to typically developing chronological-age matched children to examine the dev elopment of both structural linguistic abilities as well as the use of eval uation to elaborate and enrich narrative. Thirty children with Williams syn drome (5- through 10-years-old) and 30 typically developing age and gender- matched comparison children were asked to tell a story from a wordless pict ure book. Results indicated that as a group, children with Williams syndrom e committed significantly more morphological errors and used less complex s yntax than comparison children, not surprising considering their language d elay and impaired cognitive abilities. Significantly, children with William s syndrome greatly exceeded comparison children in their elaboration and us e of evaluative devices and showed particular preference for types of evalu ation which serve as social engagement devices, reflecting their profile of excessive sociability.