Syntax in the stories by children with the fetal alcohol syndrome
Syntax in the stories by children with the fetal alcohol syndrome

Summary/Abstract: When a pregnant woman consumes alcohol, the child may end up having physical, mental, cognitive, and social problems. The most dangerous among these problems is known as the fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). An important indicator of the level of functioning of people with FAS is provided by the syntactic system, the structure of utterances being an exponent of sentence-forming skills. This article presents the results of a study of the syntactic skills of FAS children. An analysis of the utterances of six- and ten-year-olds suffering from FAS has shown differences in the scope of the application of syntactic formulas and rules in comparison to their peers from control groups. The reduced level of syntactic competence in children with FAS is indicated by the limited number of syntactic constructions used to make a story, the low average sentence length, the more frequent use of single rather than compound utterances, and the low variation in syntactic constructions in texts produced by FAS children.

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