Grammatical constructions in Cri du chat syndrome—Findings from a case study

Abstract

The literature on grammatical skills in persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CCS) is very limited, and the need for more knowledge in this area is thus evident, in particular for speech and language therapists working with individuals with this syndrome. This case study report describes the syntactic skills of a 14-year-old Norwegian girl with CCS. The theoretical framework is construction grammar. Data for the study were collected in a diary by the author over a period of 4 months and make up a corpus of 552 utterances. These utterances are described in terms of MLU, diversity of argument structure constructions, proportion and types of complex utterances, use of auxiliaries, as well as deviant word order patterns, types of omissions, and use of prefabricated units. The primary aim of the study is to identify strengths and weaknesses in syntactic skills, which provide the basis for future research on grammatical skills in persons with CCS.

Keywords:

• Cri du chat syndrome
• syntactic skills
• construction grammar

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Marianne Lind, Hanne Gram Simonsen, Inger Moen, and the anonymous reviewers of CLP for useful comments and suggestions to earlier versions of this paper. Needless to say, all remaining errors are my responsibility.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. Ideally, these interactions should have been recorded; however, since this would have meant that Hanna would have had to carry recording equipment all waking hours every day for several months, I considered such a procedure difficult to go through with.

2. The identification of type of speech act was made on the basis of the context the utterance appeared in. In some cases word order and the presence of particular inflected forms also signalled a particular utterance type.

3. Target utterances are included for comparison in all examples when the syntax of Hanna's utterance deviated from the target.

4. Utterance (3c) deviates from the target in that the finite verb (lovte ‘promised’) is in third position, and not in the second, as is expected in a verb-second language like Norwegian.

5. In colloqial Norwegian it is not uncommon to omit det er in (10b).