Fluent language with impaired pragmatics in children with Williams syndrome

We investigated the pragmatic language abilities of children with Williams syndrome (WS) and typically developing (TD) controls in an object-choice situation. After the children chose the object, the experimenter verbally expressed his understanding or misunderstanding of the choice and then gave the children the desired or undesired object. Children with WS produced fewer verbalizations for clarification than did TD children, particularly when they were verbally misunderstood, although children with WS generally talked almost as much as the TD children. This implies that children with WS may show impairment in communication repair skills for sharing what they meant with others. Such impairment might be related to the difficulties with relevant communication (i.e., influencing others’ mental states with as little effort as possible) that are found in children with WS.