Language profiles in children with concussion.

Primary Objective: Inform the production of a screening tool for language in children with concussion. The authors predicted that children with a recent concussion would perform the cognitive-linguistic tasks more poorly, but some tasks may be more sensitive to concussion than others.Methods & Procedures: 22 elementary school aged children within 30 days of a concussion and age-matched peers with no history of concussion were assessed on a battery of novel language and cognitive-linguistic tasks. They also completed an auditory attention task and the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices.Main Outcomes & Results: Children with a recent concussion scored significantly more poorly in novel tasks targeting category identification, grammaticality judgments, and recognizing target words presented in a short story than their age-matched peers with no such injury history. All observed effects had moderate sizes. Inclusion of these three tasks significantly improved prediction of concussion status over symptom score when controlling for the age of participants.Conclusions: The finding supports continued investigation of targeted linguistic tasks in children following concussion, particularly in the domains of semantic and syntactic access and verbal working memory. Future work developing brief language assessments specifically targeting children in this age range may provide a valuable addition to the existing tools for identifying the effects of concussion.

Knowledge of constraints on compounding in children and adolescents with Williams syndrome.

This study examines knowledge of a constraint on the form of synthetic noun-noun compounds in a group of 12 children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; age 8-16 years). The constraint blocks regular plurals from appearing inside compounds (e.g., ferrets breeder) while allowing irregular plurals in the same environment (e.g., mice breeder). In an elicited production task, the WS group showed a strong asymmetry in rates of plurals inside compounds, allowing irregulars liberally but almost never allowing regulars. This demonstrates that people with WS are capable of acquiring and applying combinatorial knowledge that requires the suppression of productive morphological rules, contrary to some recent proposals. These results are compared with other studies of compounding, and the implications of these results for theories of the WS grammatical profile are discussed.

Objects, motions, and paths: spatial language in children with Williams syndrome.

The acquisition of spatial language is often assumed to be built upon an early- emerging system of nonlinguistic spatial knowledge. We tested this relationship by examining spatial language in children with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder that gives rise to severe nonlinguistic spatial de deficits together with relatively spared language. Twelve children with WS, 12 normally developing mental-age matched children, and 12 normal adults described 80 videotaped motion events. Children with WS showed substantial control over key linguistic components of the motion event, including appropriate semantic and syntactic encoding of Figure and Ground objects, Manner of Motion, and Path. The expression of Path, although surprisingly spared, was more fragile among children with WS in contexts plausibly related to their nonlinguistic spatial deficit. The results show strong preservation of the formal aspects of spatial linguistic knowledge and suggest that the nonlinguistic spatial deficits shown by children with WS have, at most, limited effects on their spatial language. These findings have implications for the relationship between spatial language and other aspects of spatial cognition.