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    Attention deficits predict phenotypic outcomes in syndrome-specific and domain-specific ways

    Cornish, K. and Steele, A. and Rondinelli Cobra Monteiro, C and Karmiloff-Smith, Annette and Scerif, G. (2012) Attention deficits predict phenotypic outcomes in syndrome-specific and domain-specific ways. Frontiers in Psychology 3 , p. 227. ISSN 1664-1078.

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    Abstract

    Attentional difficulties, both at home and in the classroom, are reported across a number of neurodevelopmental disorders. However, exactly how attention influences early socio-cognitive learning remains unclear. We addressed this question both concurrently and longitudinally in a cross-syndrome design, with respect to the communicative domain of vocabulary and to the cognitive domain of early literacy, and then extended the analysis to social behavior. Participants were young children (aged 4–9 years at Time 1) with either Williams syndrome (WS, N = 26) or Down syndrome (DS, N = 26) and typically developing controls (N = 103). Children with WS displayed significantly greater attentional deficits (as indexed by teacher report of behavior typical of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than children with DS, but both groups had greater attentional problems than the controls. Despite their attention differences, children with DS and those with WS were equivalent in their cognitive abilities of reading single words, both at Time 1 and 12 months later, at Time 2, although they differed in their early communicative abilities in terms of vocabulary. Greater ADHD-like behaviors predicted poorer subsequent literacy for children with DS, but not for children with WS, pointing to syndrome-specific attentional constraints on specific aspects of early development. Overall, our findings highlight the need to investigate more precisely whether and, if so, how, syndrome-specific profiles of behavioral difficulties constrain learning and socio-cognitive outcomes across different domains.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permission
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): attention, literacy and early reading development, longitudinal data analysis, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, neurodevelopmental disorders
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Sarah Hall
    Date Deposited: 17 Sep 2015 11:07
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:18
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12951

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