Auditory temporal perception of children with left or right brain lesions

Twenty left and 12 right brain lesioned children were administered Tallal's Repetition Task in which they were required to discriminate, associate and sequence two nonverbal auditory stimuli. Unlike adults with left hemisphere injury or children with developmental language disorders previously described by Tallal, neither left nor right brain-lesioned children differ significantly from control subjects matched by age, sex, race and social class. These results contrast with earlier reports of impaired spoken syntax and delayed lexical retrieval among many of these same left lesioned children, suggesting that prelinguistic auditory processing and higher language deficits may be dissociable among young left hemisphere impaired children. The findings demonstrate that the higher level language deficits seen in the left brain lesioned children cannot be attributed to difficulty in more preliminary analyses of the acoustic stimuli.