engleski

Early lexical and morphosyntactical development in children with perinatal brain lesions

The purpose of this study is to analyse the interaction between lexical and morphosyntactic development in the earliest phases of Croatian language acquisition in children with perinatal brain damage. Sonographic methods of neuroimaging enable early discovery as well as the research of lesions development in the area of biomedicine while in the other areas they open possibilities of bihevioral follow up research. The project called \"Early communicative and language development in children with early brain injury\" is trying to add to the understanding of neurobiological bases of language development by observing the prelinguistic and early linguistic communication. Existing understending points to the heterogenous group of children, with the rate of language and speech development showing big differences in their inidividual profiles in both the segment of expression and language understanding. By the time they reach the language level a significant discrepancy between language comprehension and expression is noticable. The discrepancy relates to the fact that all subjects understand language significantly better than they speak it. The professional literature deals mainly with the dissociation phenomena of comprehension and production in the lexical development but such an important discrepancy is unnoticable in the lexical and grammatical development during the early language development. Still, it is of great importance to reexamine the discrepancy in children with brain injuries but also in children who are acquiring morphologicaly richer languages like Croatian. However, the developmental relation between different language components depends not only on language but on the neurobiological essumptions of a child, as well. In the same way, the children with the early brain lesions are subjected to somewhat different input due to their parents concerns and stronger stimulation and to the often present motoric limitations. These reasons make it specialy interesting to study the phenomena of first morphosyntactical forms in children with perinatal brain lesions. Subjects. The participants were 5 monolingual Croatian children who suffered perinatal brain lesions. The children were selected from a larger sample of an ongoing longitudinal study of early language and communication in children with early brain lesions. All subjects come from middle class families and have typical pattern of communicational development. According to the medical findings of neuropediatric monitoring, subjects have diagnosed intraventricular haemorrhage or periventricular leukomalacia. Materials. Lexical development is investigated with the Croatian version of Mac Arthur Comunication Development Inventory (KORALJE), Peabody Picture Vocabulary Scale and picture naming test. The Reynell Reynell Developmental Language Scale for has also been applied. The data about the first morphosyntactical forms characteristics was obtained from the sample of spontaneous speach conducted during the play time between a mother and her child during the interval of 20 minutes. The interaction was video-taped and transcribed. The results point to the evident dissociation of early lexical comprehension and production. Although such children show certain delay in the general language development, the slight increase in the expressive vocabulary during the early language development is specially emphasized. This presentation will give special attention to the interpretation of morphosyntactical productivity characteristics in early utterances.

early language development; brain lesion; interaction; communication

nije evidentirano