Svaldi Cheyenne, Galli Juan-Ignacio, Paquier Philippe, Keulen Stefanie, Van Elp Henrieke, Catsman-Berrevoets Coriene, Kingma Annet, Jonkers Roel, Kohnen Saskia, de Aguiar Vânia
Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen, PO box 716, 9700 AS, Groningen, the Netherlands.
Brussels Centre for Language Studies (BCLS), Language, Brain and Cognition, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium.
Cerebellum. 2025 Jan 7;24(1):26. doi: 10.1007/s12311-024-01754-2.
Pediatric cerebellar tumor survivors may present with spontaneous language impairments following treatment, but the nature of these impairments is still largely unclear. A recent study by Svaldi et al. (Cerebellum. 23:523-44, 2023) found a broad spectrum of spontaneous language impairments irrespective of postoperative cerebellar mutism syndrome (pCMS) diagnosis in long-term pediatric cerebellar tumor survivors. Several patients presented with reduced grammatical or lexical accuracy, but a detailed error analysis was lacking. The present study builds on this study by 1) investigating the error types in spontaneous language across three language processing levels in the same participant group and 2) by evaluating the possible association between pCMS and the processing nature of the language impairments. Spontaneous language was evaluated in 12 long-term survivors of pediatric cerebellar tumors (M(SD) = 4;8(3;8) years), of whom five were diagnosed with pCMS. The proportion of occurrence of each error type was compared between each patient and five matched controls using individual case statistics, reflecting (lexico-)phonological (i.e., phonemic paraphasias), lexical-semantic (e.g., empty speech) and morphosyntactic processing (e.g., verb inflection errors). Each patient showed a significantly higher proportion of at least one of the included error types across all language processing levels. A higher proportion of general-all-purpose verbs and inaccurate verb inflection were the most common errors and respectively reflected lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic processing. Additional language impairments were identified using the error analysis that were not identified with standard language measures and psycholinguistic analysis, suggesting the added diagnostic value of error analyses.
小儿小脑肿瘤幸存者在治疗后可能会出现自发性语言障碍，但这些障碍的本质仍 largely 不清楚。Svaldi 等人最近的一项研究（《小脑》。23:523 - 44, 2023）发现，在长期小儿小脑肿瘤幸存者中，无论是否诊断为术后小脑缄默综合征（pCMS），都存在广泛的自发性语言障碍。一些患者出现语法或词汇准确性下降，但缺乏详细的错误分析。本研究在此基础上进行了以下研究：1）在同一参与者群体中，调查三个语言处理水平上自发性语言的错误类型；2）评估 pCMS 与语言障碍处理本质之间的可能关联。对 12 名小儿小脑肿瘤长期幸存者（M(SD) = 4;8(3;8)岁）的自发性语言进行了评估，其中 5 人被诊断为 pCMS。使用个体病例统计方法，比较了每位患者与五名匹配对照中每种错误类型的发生比例，反映了（词汇 -）语音（即音素性错语）、词汇语义（如空洞言语）和形态句法处理（如动词屈折错误）。每位患者在所有语言处理水平上至少有一种纳入的错误类型的比例显著更高。通用动词比例较高和动词屈折不准确是最常见的错误，分别反映了词汇语义和形态句法处理。通过错误分析还发现了使用标准语言测量和心理语言学分析未识别出的其他语言障碍，这表明错误分析具有额外的诊断价值。
