ORAL DISCOURSE AFTER EARLY-ONSET HYDROCEPHALUS - LINGUISTIC AMBIGUITY, FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, SPEECH ACTS, AND SCRIPT-BASED INFERENCES

Studied 101 children, ages 6 to 15 years (50 with early-onset hydrocep halus, 51 normally developing), on four oral discourse tasks: establis hing alternate meanings for ambiguous sentences; understanding figurat ive expressions; making bridging inferences; and producing speech acts . Children with hydrocephalus performed more poorly than controls on a ll four discourse tasks; and a higher-IQ hydrocephalus subgroup perfor med more poorly than controls on all but the figurative expressions ta sk. The fluent, grammatically framed, but content-impoverished languag e described in early-onset hydrocephalus appears to reflect not so muc h problems in deriving word- and sentence-based meaning as deficits in the pragmatic use and understanding of language in discourse.