Online measures of basic language skills in children with early focal brain lesions

Twenty children with curly focal lesions were compared with 150 age-matched control subjects on Il online measures of the basic skills underlying lang uage processing, a digit span task. and 6 standardized measures. Although m ost of the children with brain injury scored within the normal range on the majority of the tasks, they also had a disproportionately high number of o utlier scores on the reaction time tests. This evidence for a moderate impa irment of the basic skills underlying language processing contrasts with ot her evidence suggesting: that these children acquire normal control of the functional use of language. Furthermore, these children scored within the n ormal range on a measure of general cognitive ability, suggesting that ther e is no particular sparing of linguistic functions at the: expense of gener al cognitive functions. Using the MPD procedure (Valdes-Perez & Pericliev, 1997, we found that the controls and the live clinical groups could be best distinguished with two measures of online processing (word repetition and visual number naming) and one standardized test subcomponent (the CELF oral Directions subtest). The 12 children with left hemisphere lesions scored s ignificantly lower than the 8 other children on the CELF-RS measure. Within the roup of children with cerebral infarct. the nature of the processing d isability could be linked fairly well to site of lesion. Otherwise. there w as little relation between site or size of lesion and the pattern of defici t. These results support a model in which damage to the complex functional circuits subserving language leads to only minor deficits in process effici ency. because of the plasticity of developmental processes. (C) 2000 Academ ic Press.