Cognitive, Lexical and Morpho-Syntactic Profiles of Israeli Children with Williams Syndrome

This paper investigated the cognitive, lexical and morpho-syntactic profiles of school-age Israeli children with confirmed diagnosis of Williams syndrome (WS). Children with retardation of unknown etiologies were individually matched to the children with WS. The findings suggest a cognitive profile that was similar to the profile reported for English-speaking children with WS, whose unique features were seen mainly in the discrepancy between verbal IQ and performance IQ and in relatively preserved face recognition abilities (Frangiskakis et al., 1996; Mervis et al., 1999). Contrary to previous findings, cognitive, lexical and morpho-syntactic profiles of individual children were rather similar, confirming the findings that were based on matched-pairs comparisons.