Linguistic difficulties in children and adolescents after acquired brain injury: A retrospective study

The purpose of this study was to focus on two linguistic abilities, word retrieval (expressive language) and comprehension of vocabulary and grammar (receptive language), as well as to investigate to what extent long-term problems exist in these areas in children following traumatic brain injury.

Two groups of children were studied retrospectively: twenty-four children with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and twenty-one children diagnosed with brain tumour. All children had been referred to the rehabilitation team for assessment. The children were between four and seventeen years old when assessed, with the assessments performed at least one year after the injury or brain tumour diagnosis. An established set of tests regarding word retrieval and comprehension of vocabulary and grammar was used, and the results were compared with normative test data.

In both clinical groups, significantly more children scored lower than the designated "normal" score than in the normative sample on tests measuring confrontation naming and phonological word retrieval. In addition, in the brain tumour group, more children demonstrated significantly lower results than normal performance on a test for semantic word retrieval. In the TBI group, significantly more children scored below the normal value on tests of word and grammatical comprehension when compared to the normative sample.

This study confirms that word retrieval is an area of deficit in many children with acquired brain injuries one year or more after the injury occurred. The study also indicates that children with TBI may have persistent deficits in comprehension of both vocabulary and grammar.