Linguistic description of sentence production of Spanish speakers with Williams syndrome

This paper describes the grammatical complexity and sentence production in spontaneous speech among Spanish-speaking adults with Williams syndrome (WS). The goal is to provide a linguistic description of the typical sentence patterns used by Spanish speakers with WS. A sample of 30 spontaneous speech corpora (16 WS, 14 TD) was collected, transcribed and manually analyzed. The study identifies significant differences between the two groups, particularly in the complexity of syntactic constructions and the discourse production. Results show that WS speakers produce fewer words and significantly fewer complex sentences, such as those involving complementizers, pronominalized objects, or relative clauses. These findings align with prior research, suggesting deficits in working memory, syntactic production, and the manipulation of hierarchical grammatical rules among WS individuals. This study corroborates the notion that while WS individuals often display notable verbal strengths, these coexist with an atypical development of their syntactic capacity.