Unilateral brain lesions in childhood: Performance on the revised token test

Abstract

Comprehension of connected language as assessed by the Revised Token Test (RTT) was studied in 17 children with left hemisphere lesions (LL) and 11 with right hemisphere lesions (RL). LL children's significantly lower performance on several subtests than left controls (LC) matched by age, sex, race, and social class appeared to be related to the memory demands of these subtests rather than the limited syntactic elements assessed by the RTT. LL subjects requested significantly more command repetitions than control or RL subjects and when a repetition was not requested LL subjects often responded with immediacy. Although RL children tended to perform lower than right matched controls (RC), these differences were not significant nor readily related to either the memory or specific linguistic structures assessed. RL subjects required fewer command repetitions than LL subjects and exhibited a significantly greater frequency of immediate responses than controls or LL subjects. While based on few children, a trend for LL children with retrorolandic lesions to perform more poorly than those with left prerolandic lesions was suggested. No systematic difference in performance was apparent for children with left cortical vs. left subcortical lesions or among discrete sites of lesions within the right hemisphere. Children with left lesions prior to 1 year of age performed no better and, in several instances, significantly poorer than LL patients sustaining lesions after 1 year of age. Among RL subjects, those sustaining lesions after 1 year of age had greater difficulty than those with lesion onset before 1 year of age, especially on linguistic elements which seemed to be dependent upon visual spatial properties. Further studies are needed to evaluate the comprehension of more complex linguistic structures among children with unilateral brain lesions as well as to study the role of more basic factors such as memory and attention in explaining the present findings.