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Abstract
This article reviews research on speech and language abilities in people with cri du chat syndrome (CCS). CCS is a rare genetic disorder, with an estimated incidence between 1 in 15,000 and 1 in 50,000 births, resulting from a deletion on the short arm of chromosome 5. In general, individuals have delayed speech and language development, and some never develop spoken language. Their receptive language is better than their expressive language, although both are delayed. Regarding phonetics and phonology, substitutions, omissions, and distortions are frequent; consonant inventories are small; syllable shapes are restricted; and vowels are variable and overlap with each other acoustically. Persons with CCS have been found to inflect words from all major word classes. Little is known about syntactic skills, but some individuals are reported to express themselves in utterances of two or more words. Knowledge about speech and language development in CCS is sparse, and the need for more research is considerable.
Notes
1. Although this is not stated explicitly, its seems reasonable to assume that what is meant here is expressive and not receptive vocabulary.
2. The authors do not give any information on the range of variation. However, Lee, Potamianos, and Narayanan (Citation1999) found in a study of the acoustic properties of US children's speech that the mean value of the fundamental frequency in 7‐year‐old girls was 272Hz, measured on the basis of 14 tokens. Standard deviation was reported to be 37.
3. Data for this study were collected in the following way: throughout the period under investigation all inflected forms that were observed were registered, transcribed, and classified with respect to the inflectional categories they expressed.