Biomedical subjects

L Sabbadini

Publications and source records attributed to L Sabbadini.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2000

Drawing abilities in Williams syndrome: a case study.

Children with Williams syndrome (WS) have been reported to exhibit an unusual cognitive profile characterized by marked preservation of linguistic abilities and poor visuospatial abilities against a backdrop of generalized mental retardation. Much of the data documenting this profile come from studies of older children and adults with WS. Very few studies have reported findings from the preschool and early school-age period. As a result, little is known about the early development of cognitive processes in children with WS. Capirci, Sabbadini, and Volterra (1996) reported data from a longitudinal case study of early language development in a young child with WS. This article presents the longitudinal profile of visuospatial abilities in this same child. Data on copying and free drawing collected over a period extending from late preschool to early school age are reported. It is clear from these data that this child does indeed exhibit deficits in visuospatial abilities. Her performance clearly improved with age, but deficits persist.

Child↗

PubMed1996

Linguistic abilities in Italian children with Williams syndrome.

Recent studies on subjects with Williams syndrome (WS) have revealed a particular facility for language, rarely observed in other mental retarded populations, inspiring much belief in the independence of language from cognition. Lexical and morphosyntactic abilities of 17 Italian WS individuals, between 4.10 and 15.3 years of age, were evaluated both in comprehension and production and compared with those of normally developing Italian children. WS subjects look similar to normal controls in lexical comprehension, but they appear to perform more poorly in grammatical comprehension. Furthermore they look deviant from normals in some morphosyntactic aspects of their production. They perform better than normal controls only with respect to phonological fluency, when semantic aspects are not involved. Our data show very little evidence for a dissociation between language and cognition.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1987

Specific language impairment in children: a cross-linguistic study.

A common profile in English-speaking specifically language-impaired children is a moderate deficit across a broad range of linguistic features and a more marked, selective impairment in using bound morphemes and components of the verb system. To gain a clearer understanding of the nature of these more serious problems, we examined the speech of monolingual Italian-speaking as well as English-speaking children with specific language impairment. The evidence suggested that phonological factors contributed significantly to these children's extraordinary problems with particular linguistic features. Contrary to expectations, other marked deficits seemed more related to the opacity of the rules involved and homonymity with other morphemes than to problems with formal grammatical devices in general or components of the verb system in particular.

Child↗