Language profiles in children with concussion

ABSTRACT

Primary Objective: Inform the production of a screening tool for language in children with concussion. The authors predicted that children with a recent concussion would perform the cognitive-linguistic tasks more poorly, but some tasks may be more sensitive to concussion than others.

Methods & Procedures: 22 elementary school aged children within 30 days of a concussion and age-matched peers with no history of concussion were assessed on a battery of novel language and cognitive-linguistic tasks. They also completed an auditory attention task and the Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices.

Main Outcomes & Results: Children with a recent concussion scored significantly more poorly in novel tasks targeting category identification, grammaticality judgments, and recognizing target words presented in a short story than their age-matched peers with no such injury history. All observed effects had moderate sizes. Inclusion of these three tasks significantly improved prediction of concussion status over symptom score when controlling for the age of participants.

Conclusions: The finding supports continued investigation of targeted linguistic tasks in children following concussion, particularly in the domains of semantic and syntactic access and verbal working memory. Future work developing brief language assessments specifically targeting children in this age range may provide a valuable addition to the existing tools for identifying the effects of concussion.

KEYWORDS:

• Concussion
• language
• pediatric

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Robert G. Graw, M.D., from RightTime Medical Care and HeadFirst Sports Injury and Concussion Care centers for supporting the recruitment necessary to conduct this research. We gratefully acknowledge Drs. Colin Phillips and Philip Resnik, of the Language Science Center at the University of Maryland, for providing indispensable contributions to the development and interpretation of these tasks. We also would like to thank Dr. Kristin King for facilitating the early opportunities to conduct research in the population of people with recent concussion. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the wonderful undergraduate research assistants who contributed to this data collection.

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

Supplemental Material

The supplemental data for this article can be accessed publisher’s website.

Notes

1. Although children this age may use these scales imperfectly, tending to over-use extreme ratings and under-use moderate ratings 21.Mellor D, Moore KA. The use of Likert scales with children. J Pediatr Psychol. 2013;39 (3): 369–79., we found no reason to anticipate that children with and without a recent injury would be impacted differently in this regard. The scale of “effort” – how “hard” or “easy” the task was – was not the basis of any of the central hypotheses.