Speeded Processing of Grammar and Tool Knowledge in Tourette's Syndrome

Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a developmental disorder characterized by motor and verbal tics.

Recently, the three authors of the article, Walenski, Mostofsky, and Ullman performed a series of tests on TS children. During these experiments, they paid close attention to the response time of TS children against a control group of typically developing children in a series of verb conjugation problems and picture recognition exercises.

TS children were significantly faster in:
- producing past tenses of consistent regular verbs (slip-slipped)
- producing past tenses of regularized past tenses of novel verbs (splim-splimmed)
- naming manipulated items (a hammer)

TS children were slower in:
- producing the past tenses of irregular and inconsistent regular verbs (bring-brought)
- producing irregularized past tenses of novel verbs (splim-splam)
- naming non-manipulated items (an elephant)

Also, the accuracy level of the TS children decreased as their processing became faster, specifically when dealing with the -ed suffix. Often, an extra suffix was added such as in slippeded.

The TS children seem to perform better when the process depends on the procedural system and worse when the process depends on memorization. These findings gave way to their hypothesis that abnormalities in the frontal/basal-ganglia (specifically the portions that subserve motor function and procedural memory) may lead not only to tics (rapid, involuntary, unsuppressed behaviors) but also to a wider range of rapid behaviors which may actually give them the upper-hand over typically developing control children. Of course, faster is not always better as evidenced by the drop in the accuracy of their responses.

As teachers, we will probably have the opportunity to teach students with TS. Would you attempt to craft any of your grammar lessons in such a way as to give those students a chance to shine? If so, what type of problems or exercises would you use? If not, please explain why. Also, would the possible drop in the accuracy of their answers keep you from trying?