Impaired speech shadowing after early lesions of either hemisphere

Patients with unilateral (right, left), non-progressive cerebral lesions incurred in infancy (prior to age one) or childhood (ages one to fifteen) were asked to shadow (rapidly repeat) passages of speech either in the form of syntactically correct sentences or random word order (RWO) sentences presented at varying rates. Both patient groups and same-age controls made more errors with faster rates of presentation. Error frequency was significantly higher for all patient groups than for controls, but did not significantly differ among the patient groups themselves. The abnormal performance of the group with later childhood right hemisphere lesions was remarkable in view of that group's normal function on other language tests and normal verbal IQ score, and suggested that the cause of the problem in this group was either a specific linguistic factor not assessed by the other tests or a general factor brought out by speech shadowing.