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Part of
Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
Edited by Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A. Sanchez-Azanza and Daniel Adrover-Roig
[Not in series 223] 2019
► pp. 235–252

Evaluative language and component structure of oral narratives in Williams Syndrome

| Universidad Central de Venezuela
| Universidad de Oviedo, España
| Universidad de Oviedo, España

Williams Syndrome narratives tend to display atypically frequent uses of evaluative language. The aim of the present study is to determine the narrative language profiles of a group of 12 WS participants. We video-recorded their oral recounts of a wordless animated video and compared them to those of typically developing children matched for verbal abilities (matched by MLU). We analyzed narrative structure and evaluative devices referring to internal states and to evidentiality. Our findings suggest that the narrative length and structure of WS and TD groups were similar, but the WS narratives lacked overall coherence and clarity. The use of evaluative language in WS was at the level expected for verbal age, and thus, not significantly excessive.

Keywords: Williams Syndrome, narrative profile, evaluative language
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Procedure and coding
  • Results
    • Narrative structure
    • Narrative evaluation: Evaluative expressions
    • Narrative evaluation: Evidential markers
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 11 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.223.14shi
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