Children with Williams syndrome are chatty, have rich vocabularies and love to tell stories. Yet they have trouble learning certain complex rules of grammar, according to a study in the October issue of the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder that leads to intellectual disability, anxiety and an exuberant friendliness. Prevailing wisdom says that Williams syndrome severely diminishes spatial and mathematical reasoning, while leaving language skills intact. The new work, however, finds that children with the syndrome do not understand passive sentences that use abstract verbs, such as 'love' or 'remember.'Read more at...SFARI, October 2010.