Childhood aphasias

The study of acquired childhood aphasia has shown that the aphasic syndromes found in adults are reproducible in children with identical lesion sites and that some brain areas are essential for aphasia recovery. Besides, language deficits and learning difficulties are very common in the long-term follow-up of those children. This suggests that the adult pattern of cerebral organization for speech is established early in life and alternative organizations have a lasting price. Yet in contradiction with this, children with focal lesions sustained pre- or perinatally do not show developmentally the aphasic syndromes observed in older children and adults. One possible explanation is that the areas responsible for learning a function are different from those subserving that function as a more mature stage of development. Concerning specific language impairment in children, there is a growing evidence that such syndromes are genetically determined, but there is still a missing link between this predisposition and the structural/functional defects underlying them. The finding that these children are often impaired in other areas of mental development indicates that there may be a more basic cognitive defect underlying their language disorders.