Recovery and plasticity in child-onset aphasics: Ultimate outcome at adulthood

Abstract

The long-term outcome of linguistic and nonlinguistic functions was investigated for three closely followed, child-onset aphasic subjects at the time of their adulthood. Despite the early restoration of functional communication ability, the results of our investigation revealed that linguistic recovery was not complete and that syntactic processing difficulties, limitation of lexical-semantic abilities as well as written language processing difficulties were present. All three showed poorer performance in spontaneous speech measures, such as production of complex syntactic structure and efficiency of production, when compared to controls matched for lexical-semantic ability. The case histories suggested that the influence of residual linguistic impairments was not limited to the area of academic achievement but had broad generalizing effects on the subjects personalities and social development. Examination of the relationship between lesion site and linguistic difficulty in individual subjects showed some correspondence to adult aphasics. The results also revealed that child-onset aphasics used similar strategies for functional compensation as seen in recovered adult aphasics. These findings suggest that the mechanism for neurological reorganization of language in the child-onset aphasics studied was not completely different from, but rather analogous to, that of adult aphasics.