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[Role of the thalamus in subcortical aphasias].

27 cases of patients who presented language disorders of aphasic nature consecutive to a strictly subcortical lesion of vascular origin are reported. From a topographic point of view, the population is divided into 3 groups: thalamic lesions (15 cases), striatal lesions (9 cases), isolated lesions of the white matter (3 cases). The results of the neurolinguistic analysis of the aphasia show a great symptomatological variety. Nevertheless, in spite of this apparent diversity, certain semiologic elements appear to be common to all of the observed linguistic profiles, no matter where the lesion is: hypophonia, non fluent speech, verbal paraphasias, normal repetition, comprehension generally good. A discussion is proposed as to the specific part which certain structures, notably the thalamus, might play in the origin of these various disturbances.

Aphasia↗

Auditory memory for backward masking signals in children with language impairment.

This study was designed to investigate early auditory memory and its possible contribution to an auditory processing deficit shown by some children with language impairment. Ten children with language impairment and 10 age-matched controls participated in a series of simultaneous and backward masking tasks. The same backward masking stimulus was then used to elicit a mismatch negativity response. In the behavioral conditions, children in the language impairment group had significantly higher (poorer) signal thresholds than their nonimpaired controls in backward masking, but their thresholds in simultaneous masking were not significantly different. In the mismatch-negativity conditions, latency was prolonged and the amplitude was diminished in the children with language impairment. Taken together, these psychoacoustic and electrophysiological data suggest that in a group of children with language impairment, underlying the nonsensory language disorder, there is a neurophysiological impairment in auditory memory for complex, nonlinguistic sounds.

Attention↗

The prevalence of the FMR1 and FMR2 mutations among preschool children with language delay.

We examined the prevalence of the fragile X mental retardation (FMR1) full mutation and fragile X E mutation (FMR2) among preschoolers evaluated for language delay. A total of 534 preschoolers recruited from a Developmental Pediatric or Speech and Language Disorders clinic were tested with Southern blot and polymerase chain reaction DNA analyses; 3 were found to have the FMR1 full mutation. None of the 534 children tested positive for the FMR2 full mutation; however, 3 children had unusually small FMR2 alleles suggestive of FMR2 deletions. Screening for fragile X among language-delayed preschoolers is warranted, particularly when there is a family history of mental retardation, but regardless of sex or the presence of behavioral or physical features associated with the fragile X phenotype. The potential benefit of screening for FMR2 alterations is an unexpected implication of the study and is worthy of continued exploration.

Blotting, Southern↗

[Evaluation of a tool for developmental disorder screening in 4-year-old children].

With the aim of helping physicians working in a "Mother and Infant Protection Service" (PMI) in their mission of children's development difficulties screening, authors tried to assess performances of a clinical tool including parental informations and standardized tests. The whole four years old children going at school in a canton of Calvados department were independently examined by a PMI doctor using the tool to be estimated and by a specialized service working from a beforehand established protocol. For the language disorders on the one hand and the adaptation on the other hand, this evaluation shows a significant correlation between the PMI screening and the specialists one's: the sensitivity of the PMI examination is about 70% for those two types of difficulties with a positive predictive value respectively 28% and 57%. However the tool appears less reliable for the psychomotor disorders screening: only one quarter of the children who require a specialized investigation about these problems have been detected by the PMI screening. A filing and a selection of the questionnaire items should permit to improve the efficiency of this tool.

Child, Preschool↗

Children with inadequate language development: management guidelines for otolaryngologists.

Otolaryngologists are in the front line of physicians asked to evaluate children whose language development is lagging. The 4 most prevalent conditions to consider in the differential diagnosis are impaired hearing, mental deficiency, developmental language disorder or dysphasia, and one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum. Guidelines on when to become concerned and what to do about such children are provided. Early diagnosis is essential in order to provide remedial education at the language learning age when intervention is likely to be most efficacious.

Autistic Disorder↗

[Language and learning disorders].

OBJECTIVE: To aid health professionals, especially pediatricians, in the diagnosis and prevention of language and learning disorders. SOURCES OF DATA: Review of the relevant literature published in the past 5 years (MEDLINE and textbooks). SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS: Multiple variables, among them neurological diseases, may be related to the etiology of language and learning disorders. CONCLUSION: An adequate diagnostic investigation may guide the choice of treatment.

Child, Preschool↗

Auditory temporal perception of children with left or right brain lesions.

Twenty left and 12 right brain lesioned children were administered Tallal's Repetition Task in which they were required to discriminate, associate and sequence two nonverbal auditory stimuli. Unlike adults with left hemisphere injury or children with developmental language disorders previously described by Tallal, neither left nor right brain-lesioned children differ significantly from control subjects matched by age, sex, race and social class. These results contrast with earlier reports of impaired spoken syntax and delayed lexical retrieval among many of these same left lesioned children, suggesting that prelinguistic auditory processing and higher language deficits may be dissociable among young left hemisphere impaired children. The findings demonstrate that the higher level language deficits seen in the left brain lesioned children cannot be attributed to difficulty in more preliminary analyses of the acoustic stimuli.

Auditory Pathways↗

Echolalic speech in childhood autism. Consideration of possible underlying loci of brain damage.

The speech of echolalic autistic children is (1) specifically lacking in appropriate use of expressive-intonational features, but (2) the echolalic child's clear articulation of words and phrases indicates that discrimination of phonemic features is intact. The impairment in aphasic disorders is just the reverse. Failure to attend to auditory stimuli and the characteristic language disorder are among the most consistent findings in autistic children; they could be related. Discrimination of differential stress emphasis is the way the normal young child extracts major morphemic word stems and syntactic features from environmental speech; this may be a primitive perceptual function of brain stem auditory centers. The brain stem auditory system is especially vulnerable to perinatal injury. Damage to this system is an example of the kind of lesion that might lead to behavioral handicaps without neurological signs.

Animals↗

Developmental dysphasia: clinical importance and underlying neurological causes.

This survey deals with two aspects of developmental dysphasia which are relevant to child psychiatry; the early diagnosis and treatment of children with developmental dysphasia, which may prevent the progression of learning and behaviour disorders, and the underlying biological causes of this neuro-developmental disorder. The pathophysiology of developmental dysphasia is complex and age-related. In the pre-verbal and early verbal stage, the severity of the clinical picture is primarily determined by concomitant motor pathology (motor dysfunction, dysarthria, general and oral dyspraxia) and by receptive pathology (hearing and auditory perception). In the verbal period, linguistic problems start to play a role, and often combine with oral motor symptoms to present a mixed picture. The various language syndromes do not become clear until some time later. After the kindergarten period, the oral motor and perceptual problems decrease and the language disorders continue to play a role and influence the child's conversation, internal speech and learning a school. In a relatively small number of children without oral motor, perceptual or memory problems, there can be a basic syndrome of "pure dysphasia" without any other neurological signs. These children are very likely to have a genetically determined developmental disorder on a limited neuronal level (no cerebral damage of any kind!) such as an abnormal asymmetry of the hemispheres. In somewhat more than half the patients, this basic syndrome is accompanied by other neurological signs, most of which are indicative of functional disorders of the left hemisphere. There can also be symptoms of the right hemisphere, of the corpus callosum and of the afferent pathway systems for auditory perception. The nature and causes of these anomalies can be multifarious, so that it is unfeasible to speak of THE substrate or THE pathogenesis. Treatment should not be confined to speech therapy techniques, but should also take into consideration the existence of abnormal motor and affective development and can thus only be optimally given by a highly trained team whose expertise also extends to the schooling aspect.

Aphasia↗

Language development following brain injury in early childhood: a longitudinal case study.

The present longitudinal case study was designed to investigate the possibility that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) occurring during the second year of life, while significant lexical and grammatical competencies are emerging, could have an impact on subsequent language development. Thus, the language development of a very young girl (BL) who suffered a TBI at the age of 17 months was monitored for 6 months following the injury. Different procedures were used to measure her lexical and grammatical development: monthly parental checklists, free-play sessions and word-learning tasks. BL's results were compared with two control groups (n = 5 and 9) matched for age and gender. Overall, the results are consistent with the classical view of acquired language disorders in children: despite an initial decrease in the use of her premorbid vocabulary, BL showed no durable significant impairment on any measure of lexical or grammatical development.

Brain Injuries↗

Sequential and simultaneous processing abilities of high-functioning autistic and language-impaired children.

Investigated the Sequential and Simultaneous processing distinctions of high-functioning autistic children and children with a developmental receptive language disorder (DRLD). Twenty autistic subjects and 20 DRLD subjects were matched on age and gender, and compared to each other on their Sequential and Simultaneous processing abilities utilizing the K-ABC and selected subtests of the WISC-R. Results showed that both groups manifested a relative sequential processing deficit. However, the groups did not differ significantly on their overall sequential and simultaneous processing capabilities relative to their degree of language impairment. The application of the sequential and simultaneous processing model to the WISC-R provided consistent convergent and discriminant validation for the assessment of these processes with the WISC-R.

Aptitude↗

[A review of the alert and psycholinguistic intervention model in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder].

INTRODUCTION: In every class in our schools, teachers are faced with one or two children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a neurobiological disorder with three main clinical axes: lack of attention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Generally speaking, these children develop poorer psycholinguistic skills, although over 50% of these problems remain undetected because they are concealed by the child's behaviour. Most of the children will see some kind of adverse effect on their academic performance, chiefly in areas concerning reading and writing. DEVELOPMENT: The language disorders in ADHD are mainly related to the areas of semantics and pragmatics and, to a lesser extent, to phonetic-phonological aspects. They are discernible from the earliest months of life, during the preverbal stage, which is the time when the infant's character is being shaped. In this case, our experience shows that the character can be classed as difficult or inflexible and explosive in 56.5% of children diagnosed with ADHD. Moreover, we know that many children with this disorder find it difficult to engage in play, and 30% of them have retarded language development. A rather undefined percentage of children can have similar problems to those of children with autism spectrum disorders, which makes the differential diagnosis even more complicated. CONCLUSIONS: The mixed model of intervention in ADHD includes language work within the context of cognitive-behavioural programmes and the development of narrative skills and social competencies through a literary creativity workshop. This study offers a review of the psycholinguistic problems affecting children with ADHD in the light of our own experience, together with other clinical evidence.

Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity↗

[Disorders of short-term memory, a necessary category in the multiaxial classification scheme?].

Problems with short-term memory have been reported in conjunction with numerous psychiatric disorders of childhood. Deficits in both visual and auditory short-term memory were found more frequently in a group of 23 children between the ages of 7 and 11 years with specific developmental speech and/or language disorders and in an unselected group of 23 children seen at the inpatient unit of a child psychiatry facility than in a control group of children of comparable age and sex without language or behavior problems. Because of the diagnostic and therapeutic relevance of visual and auditory short-term memory deficits, the authors argue for the inclusion of the disorder in the Multi-axial Classification Scheme.

Child↗

Acquired aphasia in childhood with seizure disorder: a heterogeneous syndrome.

The authors report six children with acquired aphasia of unknown etiology. The clinical picture was clearly different from that seen in the usual childhood aphasias and resemble other cases initially reported as "syndrome of acquired aphasia with convulsive disorder". All had associated paroxysmal EEG abnormalities, and 5 have had clinical seizures. The language disorder has improved or remained stationary and no other neurological signs have developed. Our review of the literature and the study of our personal cases show no uniform clinical picture in these children. Three different clinical patterns seem to emerge. The first group show rapid onset and recovery of aphasia, frequent fluctuations in the severity of the language deficit typical of so-called epileptic aphasia. These children appear to have a better prognosis. The second group show worsening of the aphasic deficit after repeated seizures or episodes of aphasia. In the third group progressive deficit in language comprehension (auditory agnosia) with a variable degree of recovery and rare or no clinical seizures. The possible significance of the EEG abnormalities has been discussed and the importance of the aphasia on general behavior and the problems of differential diagnosis have been stressed.

Adult↗

From pronoun reversals to correct pronoun usage: a case study of a normally developing child.

Personal pronoun confusion ("I/me" for "you" and "you" for "me/I") was studied longitudinally in the language of a highly imitative preschool child with normally developing language. The proportion of pronoun confusion was compared with proportion of imitative utterances and with level of linguistic complexity. Over a 5-month period, pronoun confusion decreased as imitation decreased and linguistic complexity increased. The developmental changes that occurred were qualitative as well as quantitative. Several categories of pronoun confusion were observed. These were similar to pronoun confusions reported in older language-disordered children. Pronoun confusion was related to (a) a tendency to imitate utterances of others, (b) early production of "you" as a productive linguistic form, and (c) a tendency to use a pronoun rather than a noun for self-reference. Clinical implications are presented.

Child Language↗

[Diagnosis of speech retardation and early intervention].

In the diagnosis of speech retardation, not only speech production and comprehension, but the assessment of interpersonal relationships is important as an indicator of non-language development. The newly revised K method developmental examination ("Shinban K-shiki Kensahou") is widely used as an assessment for preschool children. I think the Enjouji method analytical developmental examination for infant and preschool children ("Enjouji-shiki Bunsekiteki Kensahou") is a simple and useful examination scale of developmental delay because it includes the category of interpersonal relationship. Developmental language disorder (DLD) is the most frequently noted (4.3%) in the general population as seen in our research of speech retardation of 1 year-6 month examination in Ota-ku district. Some academic societies of children warn that TV watching for a long time causes speech retardation or psychiatric disorders, but it seems to me that this influence is of limited significance. To assess autism adequately we made a checklist that includes concrete behavioral abnormalities based on the criteria of DSM-IV. The criteria of DLD are diverse and are not currently standardized now. I proposed, therefore, a criterion by unifying them.

Child, Preschool↗

An investigation into aspects of the Mayo early language screening test.

The concurrent validity and inter-tester agreement on the Mayo early language screening test (MELST), and the concurrent validity of parental anxiety about speech and language development as a screening measure were investigated. A sample (aged 18 months to 5 years) comprising 120 children referred to the Mayo speech and language therapy department during 1995 and 80 controls, was assessed on the MELST by their local public health nurse. Within a calendar month each child was reassessed on the MELST by the therapist, who also administered the Reynell developmental language scales (RDLS) and the Edinburgh articulation test (EAT) as criterion measures. Overall, the MELST achieved moderately high sensitivity and specificity measures. Phonological problems were identified with more accuracy than language problems and the test was equally sensitive to impairments in comprehension and expression. The test tended to over-refer and was least accurate in screening the language skills of children at the highest age level (4-5 years). A significant association was found between parental concern and pass/failure on each of the MELST, RDLS and EAT. As a screening measure, parental anxiety achieved high sensitivity, moderate specificity and a moderate positive predictive value. However, it also tended to over-refer, and was also least accurate in identifying speech and/or language disorders at the highest age level. Moderately high inter-tester agreement measures were found, with greater agreement between scoring for controls than referrals. The phonology sections were scored significantly higher by the public health nurses than by the therapist. The results of this study imply that the MELST is sufficiently accurate and reliable to recommend its continued use in child surveillance programmes.

Child, Preschool↗