Children with a history of acquired aphasia: residual language and academic impairments

Fifteen children and adolescents with a history of acquired aphasia were administered a battery of language and academic tests, 1-10 years postonset. As a group, these children performed significantly more poorly than non-brain-injured subjects on the language measures, with deficits in word, sentence, and paragraph comprehension; naming; oral production of complex syntactic constructions; and word fluency. One particular language deficit or cluster of deficits did not characterize the group as a whole. For individual brain-injured subjects, language deficits ranged from no or only mild impairment to significant language deficits. All brain-injured subjects were functional verbal communicators at the time of the study; that is, all were oral and primarily used grammatical sentences as their means of communication. Academic difficulties were characteristic of this population. Two thirds of the brain-injured group were receiving academic assistance of some kind at the time of the study. Poor performance on arithmetic calculations was typical. The brain-injured group was heterogeneous with regard to age at onset, etiology, extent of damage, length of recovery, and outcome profiles. Careful and comprehensive assessment of a range of language and academic abilities is essential to adequately identify needs and appropriate intervention strategies for this population.