Barnes M A, Dennis M
Psychology Department, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Brain Lang. 1998 Feb 15;61(3):309-34. doi: 10.1006/brln.1998.1843.
A review of our studies of oral and written language in children with early-onset hydrocephalus suggests that hydrocephalus is associated with specific deficits in discourse as opposed to generalized linguistic deficit. It is proposed that the language skills that are impaired in hydrocephalus are those that require context to derive meaning, while those that are intact may function relatively independent of particular discourse contexts. This hypothesis was tested in two discourse studies comparing children with hydrocephalus of average verbal IQ to age-matched controls. Study 1 investigated narrative economy, syntactic complexity, and semantic content in the retellings of familiar and less familiar fairy tales. Despite producing quantities of story content similar to controls and using syntactic economy similar to controls, the hydrocephalus group produced less of the core semantic content of both familiar and less familiar tales. Study 2 investigated inferencing and figurative language understanding in a narrative comprehension task. Even when prior knowledge was controlled, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty making inferences and recalling factual information from the story. In contrast to their ability to understand idiomatic figurative expressions, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty interpreting novel figurative expressions. The results are compatible with the hypothesis that the core discourse deficits characteristic of children with hydrocephalus are concerned with computing meaning from context. Putative processing features underlying the proposed core discourse deficit are discussed.
对我们关于早发性脑积水患儿口语和书面语言研究的综述表明，脑积水与语篇中的特定缺陷有关，而非普遍的语言缺陷。有人提出，在脑积水中受损的语言技能是那些需要语境来获取意义的技能，而那些未受损的技能可能相对独立于特定的语篇语境发挥作用。这一假设在两项语篇研究中得到了验证，这两项研究将平均语言智商的脑积水患儿与年龄匹配的对照组进行了比较。研究1调查了熟悉和不太熟悉的童话故事复述中的叙事简洁性、句法复杂性和语义内容。尽管脑积水组产生的故事内容数量与对照组相似，且使用的句法简洁性与对照组相似，但该组在熟悉和不太熟悉的故事中产生的核心语义内容较少。研究2在叙事理解任务中调查了推理和比喻语言理解。即使控制了先验知识，脑积水组在进行推理和从故事中回忆事实信息方面仍有困难。与他们理解惯用比喻表达的能力形成对比的是，脑积水组在解释新颖的比喻表达方面存在困难。这些结果与以下假设相符，即脑积水患儿特有的核心语篇缺陷与从语境中计算意义有关。文中讨论了所提出的核心语篇缺陷背后可能的处理特征。
