Acquisition of new words and phonological working memory in Williams syndrome: A case study

Abstract

We report the case of a 20-year-old woman, CS, with Williams syndrome, who showed particularly well developed language abilities (especially lexical abilities) in spite of severe visuospatial and visuoconstructive deficits. In addition, CS demonstrated a (quasi-)normal functioning of phonological short-term memory. Finally, she performed normally on a paired-associate word-non-word learning task, while being dramatically impaired in the memorization of word-word pairs. These findings corroborate the existence of a link between the phonological working memory and long-term phonological learning of new words. They also confirm that the acquisition of the phonological form of new words may occur even in the presence of a defective verbal episodic memory.