Naming performance of brain-injured children

Abstract

The naming performance of three groups of children who had experienced brain injury, children with a severe closed-head injury, children treated for posterior fossa tumour, and children treated for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia was compared to a matched control group. Only the children who had experienced a closed-head injury demonstrated significant impairment on the confrontation-naming task; however, all groups performed more poorly than the control group on a word-association task. Results are considered in light of the mechanisms of brain injury involved in each experimental group. In addition, naming tasks are considered in terms of their utility in characterizing the language skills of children with brain injury and in terms of the task demands each requires to allow adequate performance.