Does linguistic input play the same role in language learning for children with and without early brain injury?

Meredith L Rowe,Joan A Fisher,Susan Goldin-Meadow,Susan C Levine

doi:10.1037/a0012848

Abstract

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that children with BI receive from their caregivers also contributes to this early plasticity, and whether linguistic input plays a similar role in children with BI as it does in typically developing (TD) children. Growth in vocabulary and syntactic production is modeled for 80 children (53 TD, 27 BI) between 14 and 46 months. Findings indicate that caregiver input is an equally potent predictor of vocabulary growth in children with BI and in TD children. In contrast, input is a more potent predictor of syntactic growth for children with BI than for TD children. Controlling for input, lesion characteristics (lesion size, type, seizure history) also affect the language trajectories of children with BI. Thus, findings illustrate how both variability in the environment (linguistic input) and variability in the organism (lesion characteristics) work together to contribute to plasticity in language learning.

Highlights

Children with pre- or perinatal unilateral BI, even those whose lesions involve classical language areas in the left hemisphere, show remarkable plasticity for language learning
In the study that follows, we investigated the interaction between early BI and linguistic input in language learning by addressing the following research questions: (a) What does development in vocabulary and syntax production look like for TD children and children with BI between 14 and 46 months of age? (b) Does linguistic input play a similar or different role in the language development of TD children and children with BI, when we control for socioeconomic status (SES)? (c) Do particular lesion characteristics affect the language development trajectories of children with BI, even when SES and linguistic input are controlled? We took a developmental approach in that we used longitudinal methods to model growth in children’s observed vocabulary and syntax production over the first few years of language learning
We present longitudinal analyses to determine (a) whether input plays a similar or different role in the language development of TD children and children with BI, when we controlled for SES, and (b) whether certain biological characteristics affect the language development trajectories of children with BI, when we controlled for education and linguistic input

Summary

Introduction

Children with pre- or perinatal unilateral BI, even those whose lesions involve classical language areas in the left hemisphere, show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Research has focused on characterizing this variability in terms of the location and size of lesions and/or the presence or absence of seizure disorders (e.g., Bates et al, 1999; Levine, Kraus, Alexander, Suriyakham, & Huttenlocher, 2005; Staudt et al, 2002; Vargha-Khadem, Isaacs, van der Werf, Robb, & Wilson, 1992). We review this literature briefly below and suggest an additional factor worthy of consideration––variation in linguistic input

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Conclusion