RECOVERY OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE PROCESSING IN A 6-YEAR-OLD CHILD FOLLOWING A LEFT-HEMISPHERE STROKE - A LONGITUDINAL-STUDY

We report the case of a girl (D.B.) who at the age of 6 years and 7 mo nths suffered a stroke to the left hemisphere leaving her initially mu te. We monitored the recovery of D.B.'s spoken language processing ove r more than 2 years, using a cognitive neuropsychological approach. Th e initial period of mutism was followed by a rapid reappearance of voc abulary, suggestive of the recovery of previous language, rather than relearning. Early spoken language was non-fluent with pronounced word- finding difficulties, and marked by semantic and phonological paraphas ias and distorted intonation, but 2 years later appeared to have recov ered to normal. Confrontation naming was impaired on first testing, bu t was facilitated by phonemic cueing, indicating once again a difficul ty with lexical access rather than lexical loss. Two years later, nami ng ability had recovered to an average normal level. From the first, c omprehension of single words was found to be intact and early problems with sentence comprehension recovered to a superior level over the co urse of 2 years. Written language processing, however, remained severe ly impaired. We suggest that detailed longitudinal studies which inves tigate the nature and extent of the language disorder in individual ca ses, offer a principled method for the study of patterns of recovery f rom acquired childhood aphasia.