Perceptual Speech and Paralinguistic Skills of Adolescents With Williams Syndrome

<jats:p> The purpose of this research was to compare selected speech and paralinguistic skills of speakers with Williams syndrome (WS) and typically developing peers and to demonstrate the feasibility of providing preexisting databases to students to facilitate graduate research. In a series of three studies, conversational samples of 12 adolescents with WS and 12 adolescents matched for chronological age and sex were compared on a variety of speech and paralinguistic measures. The participants with WS performed similarly to age-matched peers on intelligibility, percentage consonants correct, loudness, phrasing, and pitch. There was a significant difference between the groups of participants for modified phonological mean length of utterances, mean syllables per word attempted and accurate productions, whole word accuracy, fillers, laughter, repetitions/reformulations, sound effects, rate, stress, and voice quality. In several cases, the performance of the adolescents with WS was stronger than age-matched participants. </jats:p>