Syntactic Ability of Girls With Fragile X Syndrome: Phonological Memory and Discourse Demands on Complex Sentence Use.
Sara T Kover, Leonard Abbeduto
PMID 31756147WHAT IT FOUND
Girls with fragile X syndrome produced shorter sentences than age-matched peers during narration.
Their sentence complexity did not differ from younger girls matched for cognitive ability. Phonological memory predicted narrative syntax, but not conversation.
Key findings
01Females with FXS produced lower mean length of C-units during narration than expected for their chronological age, indicating a delay in utterance length.
02When compared to typically developing girls matched for nonverbal cognition and receptive syntax, females with FXS showed no significant difference in syntactic complexity measures.
03Phonological memory and verbal working memory were positively correlated with syntactic complexity during narration, but not during conversation.
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What it does not show
Small sample size (16 females with FXS) limits statistical power, particularly for detecting subtle differences or interactions. The typically developing comparison group was younger (4–8 years) and matched for cognitive level, not age, which isolates developmental level but may obscure age-specific delays in certain domains. The DLevel coding scheme was designed for older individuals with mild impairments and may not be sensitive enough to capture emerging syntactic abilities in this adolescent population. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot track developmental trajectories over time. Social anxiety, common in FXS, may have influenced performance in the conversational context, potentially depressing syntactic complexity scores in that setting.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Mental Health.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that females with FXS have typical syntactic complexity based on the lack of difference from the cognitive-matched group. The delay was evident in utterance length during narration when compared to age-matched norms, and the cognitive-matched comparison controls for developmental level rather than chronological age.