Language and affective facial expression in children with perinatal stroke

Abstract

Children with perinatal stroke (PS) provide a unique opportunity to understand developing brain-behavior relations. Previous research has noted distinctive differences in behavioral sequelae between children with PS and adults with acquired stroke: children fare better, presumably due to the plasticity of the developing brain for adaptive reorganization. Whereas we are beginning to understand language development, we know little about another communicative domain, emotional expression. The current study investigates the use and integration of language and facial expression during an interview. As anticipated, the language performance of the five and six year old PS group is comparable to their typically developing (TD) peers, however, their affective profiles are distinctive: those with right hemisphere injury are less expressive with respect to affective language and affective facial expression than either those with left hemisphere injury or TD group. The two distinctive profiles for language and emotional expression in these children suggest gradients of neuroplasticity in the developing brain.

Investigating the extent of neuroplasticity: Writing in children with perinatal stroke

“…Given that writing builds on, and is typically more challenging than, spoken language, the PS group could have produced texts that were poorer than TD children's on most measures, with morphosyntax (Reilly et al, 2013) and spelling (Ballantyne et al, 2008) being particularly impaired, and could have struggled more with producing narratives than descriptions (Lai & Reilly, 2015;Reilly et al, 2013). Alternatively, children with PS may compensate for their linguistic deficits, such that the PS and TD groups would perform similarly on the writing tasks.…”

“…School age children with lesions to either hemisphere perform comparably during conversational tasks (Bates et al, 2001;Lai & Reilly, 2015), narrative re-tell tasks (Reilly et al, 1998;Reilly et al, 2004), in comprehension of idioms (Kempler, Van Lancker, Marchman, & Bates, 1999), on standardized IQ and language tasks (Ballantyne, Spilkin, Hesselink, & Trauner, 2008;Ballantyne, Splikin, & Trauner, 2007), as well as on a variety of morphosyntactic tasks (Marchman, Saccuman, & Wulfeck, 2004;Weckerly, Wulfeck, & Reilly, 2004;. Inconsistent hemispheric differences in young children with PS have been observed in the lexical domain.…”

“…Most studies find no differences by school age (but see Reilly et al, 2013). Note that children with PS perform comparably to adults with lesions in other cognitive domains like visuospatial processing (e.g., Stiles et al, 2008) and in use of facial and linguistic affect (Lai & Reilly, 2015).…”

“…By around age 5, children with PS perform in the normal range in studies using conversational paradigms (Bates et al, 2001;Lai & Reilly, 2015). However, studies of older children employing more complex tasks find evidence of a persistent underlying impairment to language.…”

“…Differences between the TD and PS groups are expected to be greatest in the narrative task rather than the descriptive task, as children with PS typically perform more like children with TD on simpler tasks (Lai & Reilly, 2015;Reilly et al, 2013).…”