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Language in boys with fragile X syndrome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2006

YONATA LEVY ,
RIKI GOTTESMAN ,
ZVI BOROCHOWITZ ,
MOSHE FRYDMAN  and
MICHAL SAGI
YONATA LEVY
Affiliation:
Psychology Department, Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem
RIKI GOTTESMAN
Affiliation:
Psychology Department, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
ZVI BOROCHOWITZ
Affiliation:
Technion-Rappoprt School of Medicine and the Simon Winter Institute for Human Genetics, Bnai Zion Medical Center
MOSHE FRYDMAN
Affiliation:
Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University and Danek Gertner Institute of Human Genetics, Sheba Medical Center
MICHAL SAGI
Affiliation:
Department of Human Genetics, Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center
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Abstract

The current paper reports of language production in 15 Hebrew-speaking boys, aged 9;0–13;0, with fully methylated, non-mosaic fragile X syndrome and no concomitant diagnosis of autism. Contrary to expectations, seven children were non-verbal. Language production in the verbal children was studied in free conversations and in context-bound speech. Despite extra caution in calculating MLU, participants' language level was not predicted by mean utterance length. Context bound speech resulted in grammatically more advanced performance than free conversation, and performance in both contexts differed in important ways from performance of typically developing MLU-matched controls. The relevance of MLU as a predictor of productive grammar in disordered populations is briefly discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , February 2006 , pp. 125 - 144
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This work was partially supported by grant 795/97 from the Israel Science Foundation to the first author and by a student's grant from the Levin Center in the Psychology Department, to the second author, who collected the data. We thank the Israeli Fragile X Association for help with the recruitment of subjects and the families and the children for collaborating with us.