Abstract
Revisiting Lenneberg’s Hypotheses About Early Developmental Plasticity: Language Organization After Left-Hemisphere Perinatal Stroke
Highlights
A prominent theme in the literature on brain injury and recovery has been the notion of early developmental plasticity (Kennard 1940, Kolb et al 2000)
A better understanding of outcomes and the variables that correlate with outcome variations can provide a foundation for developing improved treatments. We address these questions—Is the young brain successfully plastic? Can language be successful acquired by the right hemisphere (RH) if the left hemisphere (LH) is damaged?—by testing a group of teenagers and young adults who have had a large perinatal stroke to the LH middle cerebral artery (MCA) territory; and, for comparison, teenagers and young adults with comparable infarcts to the RH, and healthy controls who are matched to these groups in age and socio-economic status
All participants undergo an anatomic MRI scan, which provides a picture of the structure of their brain, and a functional scan examining their activation for language using a task called the Auditory Definition Decision Task (ADDT), along with other functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks
Summary
A prominent theme in the literature on brain injury and recovery has been the notion of early developmental plasticity (Kennard 1940, Kolb et al 2000). Basser (1962) and Lenneberg (1967) compiled published case studies, their own patient histories, and available medical records of children and adults with left and right hemisphere lesions or hemispherectomy to determine whether there were systematic effects of hemisphere and age of insult on the development or recovery of language. From these data, Lenneberg (1967) concluded that, when even massive injuries to one hemisphere occurred before age 2, most children developed language normally or with only some delay; and these outcomes were the same regardless of which hemisphere was affected. This makes our perinatal population an important contrast to Gaillard et al.’s work on epilepsy
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