Narrative processing in typically developing children and children with early unilateral brain injury: seeing gesture matters.

Narrative skill in kindergarteners has been shown to be a reliable predictor of later reading comprehension and school achievement. However, we know little about how to scaffold children's narrative skill. Here we examine whether the quality of kindergarten children's narrative retellings depends on the kind of narrative elicitation they are given. We asked this question with respect to typically developing (TD) kindergarten children and children with pre- or perinatal unilateral brain injury (PL), a group that has been shown to have difficulty with narrative production. We compared children's skill in retelling stories originally presented to them in 4 different elicitation formats: (a) wordless cartoons, (b) stories told by a narrator through the auditory modality, (c) stories told by a narrator through the audiovisual modality without co-speech gestures, and (e) stories told by a narrator in the audiovisual modality with co-speech gestures. We found that children told better structured narratives in response to the audiovisual + gesture elicitation format than in response to the other 3 elicitation formats, consistent with findings that co-speech gestures can scaffold other aspects of language and memory. The audiovisual + gesture elicitation format was particularly beneficial for children who had the most difficulty telling a well-structured narrative, a group that included children with larger lesions associated with cerebrovascular infarcts.

Does linguistic input play the same role in language learning for children with and without early brain injury?

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that children with BI receive from their caregivers also contributes to this early plasticity, and whether linguistic input plays a similar role in children with BI as it does in typically developing (TD) children. Growth in vocabulary and syntactic production is modeled for 80 children (53 TD, 27 BI) between 14 and 46 months. Findings indicate that caregiver input is an equally potent predictor of vocabulary growth in children with BI and in TD children. In contrast, input is a more potent predictor of syntactic growth for children with BI than for TD children. Controlling for input, lesion characteristics (lesion size, type, seizure history) also affect the language trajectories of children with BI. Thus, findings illustrate how both variability in the environment (linguistic input) and variability in the organism (lesion characteristics) work together to contribute to plasticity in language learning.

Words and maps: developmental changes in mental models of spatial information acquired from descriptions and depictions.

People acquire spatial information from many sources, including maps, verbal descriptions, and navigating in the environment. The different sources present spatial information in different ways. For example, maps can show many spatial relations simultaneously, but in a description, each spatial relation must be presented sequentially. The present research investigated how these source differences influence the mental models that children and adults form of the presented information. In Experiment 1, 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds and adults learned the layout of a six-room space either from verbal descriptions or from a map. They then constructed the configuration and pointed to target locations. Participants who learned from the map performed significantly better than those who learned from the description. Ten-year-olds performed nearly as well as adults did. The 8-year-olds' mental models differed substantially from the older children's and adults' mental models. The younger children retained the sequential information but did not integrate the relations into a survey-like cognitive map. Experiment 2 demonstrated that viewing the shape of the configuration, without seeing the map in full, could facilitate 8-year-olds' use of the verbal information and their ability to integrate the locations. The results demonstrate developmental differences in the mental representation of spatial information from descriptions. In addition, the results reveal that maps and other graphic representations can facilitate children's spatial thinking by helping them to transcend the sequential nature of language and direct experience.