Effects of regular auditory or auditory-visual prime sequence on the syntax treatment in childhood absence epilepsy

Abstract

Objective: Childhood Absence Epilepsy (CAE) is frequent and associated with neuropsychological impairments that are poorly referenced, especially for language. The aim was to highlight morphosyntactic impairment in CAE and to test whether rhythmic stimulation could alleviate these difficulties, as it has been shown in dyslexic, specific language impairment, deaf (with cochlear implant), and healthy children. Rhythmic primes could improve grammatical analysis by pre-orienting the temporal distribution of attention using the synchronization of cerebral oscillators. Methods: Twenty children with CAE and 20 age-matched controls were tested with two experiments. In Experiment 1, grammatical judgments had to be made on spoken sentences after listening to musical primes characterized either by salient regular rhythm or by no rhythmic regularity. In Experiment 2, grammatical judgments were made after regular musical primes or regular musical-visual ones. Furthermore, children with CAE underwent a neuropsychological examination (behavior, reasoning, morphosyntax, attention and reading) which provided a measure of priming efficiency based on their cognitive profile. Results: Results showed a morphosyntactic impairment in CAE children as compared to controls. The regular musical prime had a beneficial effect over the non-regular one for all controls and CAE children only with the following profile: no anxiety disorder (r=−.45, p<.04) and no reading impairment (r=.55, p<.01). The regular musical-visual prime had a beneficial effect for controls but a negative effect for CAE children (t(19)=2.06, p<.05). Conclusion: CAE children have a morphosyntactic impairment. However, the rehabilitation method used seems to have a limited impact in case of generalized cerebral invasion of slow waves (e.g. CAE), when it's been proven to work in other diseases. Based on our results in CAEs we are currently replicating the study in children with Rolandic Epilepsy, to investigate whether the success of this method depends upon the distribution and extent of the epileptic focus.