Competence in processing and generating phonological units in Williams syndrome, and elucidation of the prosodic structure

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This research has presented evidence for the neuroplasticity and autonomousnature of competence in processing and generatingphonological units in Williams syndrome. Basedon orthography-free phonological data obtained from the subject’s performance in backward ludling (a word-reversing language game), this research has shown that geminates and long vowels share acommon lexical structure. To unify the structures of the two longsegments, it introduced a new concept of ‘floating mora’ in phonological theory. Thisresearch has contributed to raising awareness about the linguistic relevance of atypical language, which in itself warrants proper linguisticinvestigation.