[Neuropsychological examinations in childhood]

Three groups of children aged 8-12 years have been investigated by a test battery to gain insight into the problems surrounding the relationship between cerebral and behavioral development. One group was of children with circumscribed cortical lesions, one was a group of dyslexics with neurologic anomalies, and the third was a control group of children without brain lesions. General test intelligence did not differ significantly in the three groups. Marked differences between the various lesion groups are observable in some tests but not in others. For example, the results of children with left temporal lesions in the verbal part of the intelligence test and in fresh language memory were inferior to those of all other lesion groups and the controls, while the dyslexics showed a similar if less marked deficit. Non-linguistic (figural) memory did not differ as between groups. On the other hand, children with right frontal lesions were notable for inferior results in a visual learning test and a classification test. In a linguistic-dichotic test all the groups of brain lesions and the dyslexics differed from the control group, a fact which suggests retarded development of hemispheric dominance for speech functions. From these provisional results it can be concluded that the brain areas do not all specialize simultaneously, and that compensation of cerebral lesions in relation to different functions probably results in retardation of overall brain development and anatomico-functional specialization.