Unilateral brain lesions in childhood: performance on the Revised Token Test

Comprehension of connected language as assessed by the Revised Token Test (RTT) was studied in 17 children with left hemisphere lesions (LL) and 11 with right hemisphere lesions (RL). LL children's significantly lower performance on several subtests than left controls (LC) matched by age, sex, race, and social class appeared to be related to the memory demands of these subtests rather than the limited syntactic elements assessed by the RTT. LL subjects requested significantly more command repetitions than control or RL subjects and when a repetition was not requested LL subjects often responded with immediacy. Although RL children tended to perform lower than right matched controls (RC), these differences were not significant nor readily related to either the memory or specific linguistic structures assessed. RL subjects required fewer command repetitions than LL subjects and exhibited a significantly greater frequency of immediate responses than controls or LL subjects. While based on few children, a trend for LL children with retrorolandic lesions to perform more poorly than those with left prerolandic lesions was suggested. No systematic difference in performance was apparent for children with left cortical vs. left subcortical lesions or among discrete sites of lesions within the right hemisphere. Children with left lesions prior to 1 year of age performed no better and, in several instances, significantly poorer than LL patients sustaining lesions after 1 year of age. Among RL subjects, those sustaining lesions after 1 year of age had greater difficulty than those with lesion onset before 1 year of age, especially on linguistic elements which seemed to be dependent upon visual spatial properties. Further studies are needed to evaluate the comprehension of more complex linguistic structures among children with unilateral brain lesions as well as to study the role of more basic factors such as memory and attention in explaining the present findings.     

Early lexical development in children with focal brain injury

Early lexical development in 27 children with focal brain injury was studied cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Data were obtained from children between 12 and 35 months of age who acquired their lesion prenatally or within the first 6 months of life. Results for the group as a whole provide clear evidence for delays in lexical comprehension and production, and for a larger number of comprehension/production dissociations than would be expected by chance. In addition, a significant number of children were observed having unusual difficulty mastering predication and/or using an atypically high proportion of closed class words (suggesting reliance on holistic/formulaic speech). Analyses by lesion type revealed no effect of lesion size. Analyses according to side of lesion revealed that children with right-hemisphere damage produced a higher proportion of closed class words, suggesting heavy reliance on well-practiced but under-analyzed speech formulae. Children with left-hemisphere damage were slightly better in comprehension than children with right-hemisphere damage. In addition, left posterior lesions were associated with greater delays in expressive language, and delays were more protracted in children with left posterior damage. No differential effects of left posterior damage were found for lexical comprehension.     

A study of hyperlexia

Twelve children with early intense reading and superior word recognition skills coupled with disordered language and cognitive behavior are described. Cognitive, linguistic, and reading measures evidenced a generalized cognitive deficit in forming superordinate schemata which was not specific to visual or auditory modalities. Positive family histories for reading problems were present for 11 of the 12 children, suggesting a relationship between hyperlexia and dyslexia.     

The language and social background questionnaire: Assessing degree of bilingualism in a diverse population

Research examining the cognitive consequences of bilingualism has expanded rapidly in recent years and has revealed effects on aspects of cognition across the lifespan. However, these effects are difficult to find in studies investigating young adults. One problem is that there is no standard definition of bilingualism or means of evaluating degree of bilingualism in individual participants, making it difficult to directly compare the results of different studies. Here, we describe an instrument developed to assess degree of bilingualism for young adults who live in diverse communities in which English is the official language. We demonstrate the reliability and validity of the instrument in analyses based on 408 participants. The relevant factors for describing degree of bilingualism are: (1) the extent of non-English language proficiency and use at home, and (2) non-English language use socially. We then use the bilingualism scores obtained from the instrument to demonstrate their association with: (1) performance on executive function tasks, and (2) previous classifications of participants into categories of monolinguals and bilinguals.     

Clicking away at co-rumination: co-rumination correlates across different modalities of communication

Co-rumination is associated with positive friendship quality (thought to buffer against anxiety and depression) but paradoxically higher levels of anxiety and depression. With the increasing use of technology for communication among adults, there is little known about co-rumination effects across different modalities of communication. In the current study, we examined co-rumination through four methods (i.e. in person, phone calls, text messaging, and social media) in two separate samples - college students and participants from the community. Classic co-rumination effects were found for in-person communications, and we found that co-rumination by telephone as well as by texting, for a college student sample only, mirrors some of these findings for in-person co-rumination. In studies of co-rumination, evaluation of multiple modes of communication is warranted.     

Handedness and sex of children with developmental language disorders

The handedness and sex of 4- and 5-year-old children with developmental language disorders were studied through a comparison of language disordered children and a normal control group and through a comparison of six linguistically homogeneous subgroups of language disordered children. Differences between the handedness of a generalized language disordered group and a normal control group were not found, possibly due to the multiple etiologies of developmental language disorders. Children with severe language disorders, however, were non-right-handed more often than children with mild language disorders. Furthermore, certain types of linguistic deficits were associated with non-right-handedness, whereas age and cognitive abilities were not. Males were more often language disordered than females; however, sex ratios did not significantly differ among the subgroups, possibly due to the small number of language disordered females in this study. Implications for cerebral laterality in developmental language disorders are discussed.     

Spoken syntax in children with acquired unilateral hemisphere lesions

The spoken syntax of eight left hemisphere lesioned and eight right hemisphere lesioned children were compared to matched controls. The children's lesions were acquired between 0.08 and 6.17 years of age (mean = 1.33 years), and at the time of testing they were between 1.67 and 8.15 years of age (mean = 4.19). Based on analyses of spontaneous language samples, left hemisphere lesioned subjects performed more poorly than did their controls on most measures of simple and complex sentence structure. In contrast right lesioned subjects performed similarly to their controls on these measures, except for a tendency to make more errors in simple sentence structures. These findings provide further evidence that the left and right hemispheres are not comparable in supporting syntactic abilities.     

Fluency of conversational speech in children with unilateral brain lesions

The spontaneous conversational speech of 20 children with unilateral left hemisphere lesions and 13 with right lesions was compared to normally developing peers matched by age, sex, race, and social class for instances of stuttering type nonfluencies, normal nonfluencies, and rate of speech. Both left and right lesioned children provided quantitatively more and qualitatively different patterns of nonfluencies than their neurologically normal peers. Left and right lesioned children produced more stuttering types of nonfluencies than their controls, but neither lesioned group produced a greater number of normal nonfluencies than controls. Left lesioned children also had a slower rate of speech as measured by number of syllables per second during either stuttered or fluent speech. Considerable variability was observed among lesioned children. Implications for neurogenic theories of developmental fluency disorders are discussed.