Environmental sound recognition by timbre in children with Williams syndrome

Abstract

Anecdotal reports have described children with Williams syndrome (WS) as presenting outstanding skills for recognizing environmental sounds by their timbre. This has led to suggest that the skills for environmental sound recognition by timbre are highly developed in WS. Furthermore, the term hypertimbria has been proposed to refer to this feature. However, no academic research has assessed these skills in WS. This study therefore aimed to contrast the reports on the highly developed skills for environmental sound recognition by timbre in children with WS. An environmental sound recognition task was administered to children with WS, children with Down syndrome of the same chronological age and cognitive level, and chronological age-matched typically developing children. Participants with WS performed significantly lower than their typically developing peers and no significant differences were found between the WS and Down syndrome groups. Unlike previous reports, this study points out that in WS environmental sound recognition by timbre does not constitute a phenotypic strength either in absolute or relative terms. Results suggest that children with WS do not present hypertimbria or preserved skills for timbre recognition. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of cognitive modularity.

Keywords:

• Williams syndrome
• Environmental sound recognition
• Timbre
• Phenotypic profile
• Modularity

This research was partially funded by grant AP2003-5098 from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Spanish Government. The manuscript was proofread thanks to funds from the Department of Basic Psychology (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). We would like to thank all the parents and participants who collaborated in this research.

Notes

1 It should also be noted that the same task structure (i.e., requiring participants to choose from three or more visual items the one that matches an auditory stimulus) has been broadly used in the literature to evaluate different areas of the phenotype of individuals with WS or DS. This can be exemplified when considering the large number of studies in which the tests Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (Dunn & Dunn, 1981) and Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG: Bishop, 1989, or TROG-2; Bishop, 2003) have been used in these populations (e.g., Bellugi et al., 1994; Mervis & John, 2010). This ensures that the structure of the task designed for the current research was not too complex and demanding for the children with WS and DS who participated in this study.