Receptive prosody in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

Abstract

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are known to use prosodic devices extensively in conversation and narratives, but their ability to interpret prosody to comprehend speakers' communicative intentions and emotional states has not been investigated systematically. We present findings from three experiments probing sensitivity to lexical stress and to affective prosodic cues considered at several processing levels. Adolescents and adults with WS were compared with age, IQ and receptive vocabulary-matched participants with learning or intellectual disabilities (LID), and with age-matched normal controls (NC). The WS group performed significantly better than the LID group only in recognising emotional tone of voice in filtered speech. Results reflect a relative sensitivity in the WS group to affective prosody, while the ability to use linguistic prosodic cues for semantic interpretation remains constrained by perceptual and cognitive limitations, suggesting a possible dissociation in sensitivity to different types of prosody in this population.