STEP: Online Measures of Basic Language Skills of Children with Early Focal Brain Lesions [35259]

This article applies to:
E-Prime 3.0
E-Prime 1.0

 
Detail
Experiment Author: Susan Campbell. Adapted from STEP and used with permission of Brian MacWhinney
 
Experiment Description
This experiment replicates the seven online measures that were given to children in the MacWhinney et al. study. These are very simple experiments, adapted directly from the original PsyScope experiments used to test the children in the original study.

 

NOTE: Each .zip folder contains an E-Prime 1 version and an upgraded E-Prime 3 version. The different experiment measurements used in the study are separated into individual .es and .es3 files.
 
Experiment Citation
MacWhinney, B., Feldman, H., Sacco, K., & Valdés-Pérez, R. (2000). Online measures of basic language skills in children with early focal brain lesions. Brain and Language,71, 400-431.

 
Experiment Abstract or Original Experiment Abstract
Twenty children with early focal lesions were compared with 150 age-matched control subjects on 11 online measures of the basic skills underlying language processing, a digit span task, and 6 standardized measures. Although most of the children with brain injury scored within the normal range on the majority of the tasks, they also had a disproportionately high number of outlier scores on the reaction time tests. This evidence for a moderate impairment f the basic skills underlying language processing contrasts with other evidence suggesting that these children acquire normal control of the functional use of language. Furthermore, these children scored within the normal range on a measure of general cognitive ability, suggesting that there is no particular sparing of linguistic functions at the expense of general cognitive functions. Using the MPD procedure (Valdés-Pérez & Pericliev, 1997), we found that the controls and the five clinical groups could be best distinguished with two measures of online processing (word repetition and visual number naming) and one standardized test subcomponent (the CELF Oral Directions subtest). The 12 children with left hemisphere lesions scored significantly lower than the 8 other children on the CELF-RS measure. Within the group of children with cerebral infarct, the nature of the processing disability could be linked fairly well to site of lesion. Otherwise, there was littel relation between site or size of lesion and the pattern of deficit. These results support a model in which damage to the complex functional circuits subserving language leads to only minor deficits in process efficiency, because of the plasticity of developmental processes.

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