Current trends in acquired childhood aphasia: An introduction

Abstract

Although the interest in acquired childhood aphasia (ACA) arose about a century ago, it has received considerably less attention in the literature on language disorders in childhood than has developmental aphasia. Yet the study of ACA provides a unique opportunity to investigate brain/language relationships during the process of cerebral maturation. Hence, this paper aims to give an overview of recent advances in the study of ACA. The first part focuses on acquired aphasia with convulsive disorder, because most studies on ACA published in the past decade concern this intriguing syndrome. The second part concentrates on several aspects of ACA due to other aetiologies.