DISCOURSE AFTER EARLY-ONSET HYDROCEPHALUS - CORE DEFICITS IN CHILDRENOF AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE

A review of our studies of oral and written language in children with early-onset hydrocephalus suggests that hydrocephalus is associated wi th specific deficits in discourse as opposed to generalized linguistic deficit. It is proposed that the language skills that are impaired in hydrocephalus are those that require context to derive meaning, while those that are intact may function relatively independent of particul ar discourse contexts. This hypothesis was tested in two discourse stu dies comparing children with hydrocephalus of average verbal IQ to age -matched controls. Study 1 investigated narrative economy, syntactic c omplexity, and semantic content in the retellings of familiar and less familiar fairy tales. Despite producing quantities of story content s imilar to controls and using syntactic economy similar to controls, th e hydrocephalus group produced less of the core semantic content of bo th familiar and less familiar tales. Study 2 investigated inferencing and figurative language understanding in a narrative comprehension tas k. Even when prior knowledge was controlled, the hydrocephalus group h ad difficulty making inferences and recalling factual information from the story. In contrast to their ability to understand idiomatic figur ative expressions, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty interpreting novel figurative expressions. The results are compatible with the hyp othesis that the core discourse deficits characteristic of children wi th hydrocephalus are concerned with computing meaning from context. Pu tative processing features underlying the proposed core discourse defi cit are discussed. (C) 1998 Academic Press.