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Autism and Developmental Disorders Colloquium Series

“Williams Syndrome: Language, Social Interaction, and Anxiety”

Carolyn B. Mervis, Ph.D.

Distinguished University Scholar and Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences,

University of Louisville

6:00 pm, Wednesday, November 15, 2006
MIT Building 46-3002 (auditorium), followed by a reception

Building Address: 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

Hosted by Ken Wexler, Ph.D., and the Brain Development and Disorders Project at MIT

Supported by the Simons Foundation, the Anne and Paul Marcus Family Foundation, and the Autism Treatment Network

Colloquia sponsored by the Autism Consortium

Please RSVP to lmavros@mit.edu

Williams syndrome came to the attention of cognitive scientists in the early 1990s because of claims that it provided strong evidence for the independence of language from cognition. In particular, adolescents with Williams syndrome were argued to have “normal” language in the face of severe mental retardation. More recently, Williams syndrome has been argued to contrast strongly with autism. In this presentation, I consider these claims in the context of a brief overview of my research on intelligence, language acquisition, social communication and interaction, and anxiety in Williams syndrome, focusing on both central tendencies and variability. Methods include standardized assessments, longitudinal tracking of vocabulary, language samples, experiments addressing vocabulary learning, semistructured play-based measures addressing socio-communicative abilities, structured interviews designed to provide DSM-IV diagnoses of anxiety and related disorders, and neuroimaging.