Martins I P
Department of Neurology, University Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon, Portugal.
Clin Neurosci. 1997;4(2):73-7.
The study of acquired childhood aphasia has shown that the aphasic syndromes found in adults are reproducible in children with identical lesion sites and that some brain areas are essential for aphasia recovery. Besides, language deficits and learning difficulties are very common in the long-term follow-up of those children. This suggests that the adult pattern of cerebral organization for speech is established early in life and alternative organizations have a lasting price. Yet in contradiction with this, children with focal lesions sustained pre- or perinatally do not show developmentally the aphasic syndromes observed in older children and adults. One possible explanation is that the areas responsible for learning a function are different from those subserving that function as a more mature stage of development. Concerning specific language impairment in children, there is a growing evidence that such syndromes are genetically determined, but there is still a missing link between this predisposition and the structural/functional defects underlying them. The finding that these children are often impaired in other areas of mental development indicates that there may be a more basic cognitive defect underlying their language disorders.
对儿童获得性失语症的研究表明，在患有相同病变部位的儿童中可再现成人中发现的失语综合征，并且某些脑区对失语症的恢复至关重要。此外，在对这些儿童的长期随访中，语言缺陷和学习困难非常常见。这表明成人的言语脑组织模式在生命早期就已确立，而替代组织则会付出持久的代价。然而，与此相矛盾的是，在出生前或围产期遭受局灶性病变的儿童在发育过程中并未表现出在大龄儿童和成人中观察到的失语综合征。一种可能的解释是，负责学习一项功能的区域与在发育更成熟阶段维持该功能的区域不同。关于儿童的特定语言障碍，越来越多的证据表明此类综合征是由基因决定的，但这种易感性与其潜在的结构/功能缺陷之间仍存在缺失环节。这些儿童在其他心理发展领域经常受损的发现表明，其语言障碍可能存在更基本的认知缺陷。
