NARRATIVE DISCOURSE IN CHILDREN WITH EARLY FOCAL BRAIN INJURY

Children with early brain damage, unlike adult stroke victims, often g o on to develop nearly normal language. However, the route and extent of their linguistic development are still unclear, as is the relations hip between lesion site and patterns of delay and recovery. Here we ad dress these questions by examining narratives from children with early brain damage. Thirty children (ages 3;7-10;10) with pre or perinatal unilateral focal brain damage and their matched controls participated in a storytelling task. Analyses focused on linguistic proficiency and narrative competence. Overall, children with brain damage scored sign ificantly lower than their age-matched controls on both linguistic (mo rphological and syntactic) indices and those targeting broader narrati ve qualities. Rather than indicating that children with brain damage f ully catch up, these data suggest that deficits in linguistic abilitie s reassert themselves as children face new linguistic challenges. Inte restingly, after age 5, site of lesion does not appear to be a signifi cant factor and the delays we have witnessed do not map onto the lesio n profiles observed in adults with analogous brain injuries. (C) 1998 Academic Press.