MacWhinney B, Feldman H, Sacco K, Valdés-Pérez R
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Brain Lang. 2000 Feb 15;71(3):400-31. doi: 10.1006/brln.1999.2273.
Twenty children with early focal lesions were compared with 150 age-matched control subjects on 11 online measures of the basic skills underlying language processing, a digit span task, and 6 standardized measures. Although most of the children with brain injury scored within the normal range on the majority of the tasks, they also had a disproportionately high number of outlier scores on the reaction time tests. This evidence for a moderate impairment of the basic skills underlying language processing contrasts with other evidence suggesting that these children acquire normal control of the functional use of language. Furthermore, these children scored within the normal range on a measure of general cognitive ability, suggesting that there is no particular sparing of linguistic functions at the expense of general cognitive functions. Using the MPD procedure (Valdés-Pérez & Pericliev, 1997), we found that the controls and the five clinical groups could be best distinguished with two measures of online processing (word repetition and visual number naming) and one standardized test subcomponent (the CELF Oral Directions subtest). The 12 children with left hemisphere lesions scored significantly lower than the 8 other children on the CELF-RS measure. Within the group of children with cerebral infarct, the nature of the processing disability could be linked fairly well to site of lesion. Otherwise, there was little relation between site or size of lesion and the pattern of deficit. These results support a model in which damage to the complex functional circuits subserving language leads to only minor deficits in process efficiency, because of the plasticity of developmental processes.
将20名患有早期局灶性病变的儿童与150名年龄匹配的对照受试者，在语言处理基础基本技能的11项在线测量、一个数字广度任务和6项标准化测量上进行了比较。尽管大多数脑损伤儿童在大多数任务中的得分都在正常范围内，但他们在反应时间测试中的异常得分数量也不成比例地高。这种语言处理基础基本技能存在中度损伤的证据，与其他表明这些儿童能够正常控制语言功能使用的证据形成对比。此外，这些儿童在一般认知能力测量中的得分在正常范围内，这表明不存在以牺牲一般认知功能为代价而特别保留语言功能的情况。使用MPD程序（Valdés-Pérez & Pericliev，1997），我们发现对照组和五个临床组可以通过两项在线处理测量（单词重复和视觉数字命名）和一项标准化测试子成分（CELF口语指令子测试）得到最佳区分。在CELF-RS测量中，12名左半球病变儿童的得分显著低于其他8名儿童。在脑梗死儿童组中，处理障碍的性质与病变部位有相当好的关联。否则，病变部位或大小与缺陷模式之间几乎没有关系。这些结果支持了一种模型，即由于发育过程的可塑性，服务于语言的复杂功能回路受损只会导致处理效率上的轻微缺陷。
