engleski

Narrative and other aspects of memory in three groups of preschoolers : perinatal brain lesions/specific language impairment/typically developing children

Leading question: A cohort of children with brain lesions acquired perinatally has newly come under the loop of interdisciplinary interest, from the neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, speech and language pathologists, neuropediatricians and other experts. The problems of children with specific language impairment (SLI) have longer research history. Starting from the point that children with perinatal brain lesions may represent a risk group for manifesting language difficulties and that language difficulties in some and/or many levels are firmly the main feature of the SLI group, we were motivated to investigate their cognitive and language outcome. Data: There are findings that speak in favor of language outcome for the perinatally brain lesion children putting it between the SLI and typically developing children, for example, better grammatical sensitivity in the lesion group (Wufleck et all., 2004.). As different memory systems have shown to be important background for language development in general, the work is more oriented to memory abilities than language outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to get insight into performance on easier and more complex memory tasks in three mentioned groups and also possible relations of abilities within the each group. Methods: Three different groups of children are caught in the average age of 6. The number of each group is 15 (all together=45). The population with brain lesions was recruited with the neuropediatricianist help. These chidren have a history of perinatal risk factors and perinatal brain injury. The SLI group met the proposed criteria for the disorder (-1, 5 SD delay in language comprehension and history of morphosyntactic and/or phonological and/or semantic difficulties). Typically developing children are matched in the age and general intelligence. The methods capture the combination of two psychological tests, the narrative memory task and memory for sentences. For general intelligence purposes Raven´s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) are used. Long and short term memory measures are assessed by two subtests of the verbal Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). Narrative memory task is a part of NEPSY – a developmental neuropsychological assessment. The task includes free recall and a cued recall of the told story. Memory for sentences is investigated through repeating sentences and pseudo-sentences. Anamnesis data are also taken from the parents. The data are analysed by SPSS-12. Discriminant analysis is conducted to get information about variables which discriminate between three mentioned groups. Results of the presentation: Based on the literature findings we assume that final results will isolate some memory variables (for example ; narrative memory, backword digit span) that clearly differ three named groups.

Memory; Perinatal brain lesions; Specific language impairment; Typically developing children

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