Drawing by children with Williams syndrome: A developmental perspective

Two studies are presented that investigate the developmental aspect of visual-motor integration by children with Williams syndrome and normally developing children. In Study 1, drawings by 9- and 10-year-olds with Williams syndrome were compared to drawings by 2 groups of normally developing children: 1 group individually matched for chronological age and another group individually matched for mental age. In Study 2, the normal developmental course for this spatial cognitive skill was examined for 40 normally developing children ages 4 years to 7 yeats. In both studies, 2 drawing tasks were used: the Short Form of the Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration (VMI) and drawing then copying a flower, house, and elephant from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Evaluation (BDAE). Results from Study 1 indicated that, as expected, the children with Williams syndrome scored significantly lower on the VMI and produced significantly fewer recognizable drawings than did either their chronological age matches or their mental age matches. Nevertheless, ordinality analyses indicated that children in all 3 groups were following the same developmental sequence. Examination of the types of errors indicated that both the children with Williams syndrome and the younger mental age-matched children were likely to make errors that involved integration of simple shapes. Results from Study 2 indicated that the visual-motor integration problems observed in Study 1 also are encountered by normally developing preschool children. Findings are discussed within a developmental framework.