Dennis M, Barnes M A
Department of Psychology/Brain and Behavior Program, The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
J Head Trauma Rehabil. 2001 Oct;16(5):456-68. doi: 10.1097/00001199-200110000-00005.
Children with head injury have impairments in pragmatic language at the level of both single words and texts. Text comprehension deficits are likely to be the more consequential for everyday and academic function, yet the relative magnitudes of literal and nonliteral text comprehension deficits have not been measured.
We compared the magnitude of the impairment in three forms of text comprehension for children with mild or severe head injury relative with controls: literal language (understanding literal text information), inferential language (making pragmatic inferences, textual coherence inferences, or enriching inferences), and the language of mental states and intentions (eg, producing speech acts, appreciating irony, and understanding deception).
Effect sizes were used to measure the magnitude of the difference between children with head injury and age-matched controls.
Children with severe closed-head injury were significantly impaired on tasks of literal text understanding, inferencing, and intentionality. Children with mild head injury were impaired on some inferencing and all intentionality tasks, although they had no literal text comprehension deficits.
For both groups, the greatest deficits (ie, the largest effect sizes) were on tasks requiring understanding of the language of mental states and intentions. The data bear on the long-term effects of childhood closed-head injury on text- and discourse-level language and also on the nature and timing of language rehabilitation in children with head injury.
头部受伤儿童在单词和文本层面的语用语言方面存在缺陷。文本理解缺陷可能对日常和学业功能产生更严重的影响，但字面和非字面文本理解缺陷的相对程度尚未得到衡量。
我们比较了轻度或重度头部受伤儿童与对照组在三种文本理解形式上的损伤程度：字面语言（理解字面文本信息）、推理语言（进行语用推理、文本连贯推理或丰富推理）以及心理状态和意图语言（例如，产生言语行为、理解反讽和理解欺骗）。
效应量用于衡量头部受伤儿童与年龄匹配对照组之间差异的程度。
重度闭合性头部受伤儿童在字面文本理解、推理和意图性任务上存在显著损伤。轻度头部受伤儿童在一些推理和所有意图性任务上存在损伤，尽管他们没有字面文本理解缺陷。
对于两组儿童，最大的缺陷（即最大的效应量）出现在需要理解心理状态和意图语言的任务上。这些数据涉及儿童闭合性头部受伤对文本和语篇层面语言的长期影响，以及头部受伤儿童语言康复的性质和时机。
