ACQUIRED APHASIA IN CHILDREN

Abstract

BY acquired aphasia in children we mean the language disorganizations resulting from focal cerebral lesions occurring during childhood. In such circumstances aphasia consists in a regression of psycho-linguistic performances which has some analogies with the aphasic disorders in the adult but differs from it in that the disturbance bears upon the function of language and, more generally, upon the nervous system during their maturation. Acquired aphasia in children is entirely different from retarded speech often unfortunately labelled congenital aphasia, charac-terized by a defect in language elaboration at the origin of which there is or there is not a cerebral lesion. Acquired aphasia in children has been known for long but a few studies only have been devoted to this subject. It is common belief that it is a rare disorder and moreover that it is remarkably transitory so that sequelae are very few or absent. Exception being made for isolated cases, the work of E. Guttmann (1942) is the earliest comprehensive review of the symptomatology and evolution. Guttmann (1942) reported 16 patients with aphasia among 30 children under the age of 14 having hemispheric lesions. He emphasized the fact that the aphasia was characterized by a reduction of verbal expression, whatever the situation of the lesion; in other terms that jargonaphasia and logorrhoea did not occur. The rapidity of recovery of the language was remarkable. Further-more, Guttmann (1942) pointed to the intellectual deficiencies which may last, and rightly ascribed them to brain damage rather than to aphasia. A. Branco Lefevre (1950) and J. de Ajuriaguerra (1958) con-firmed Guttmann's observations and drew attention to the disorders of written speech and to the fact that recovery progresses often less quickly than it is commonly admitted. In this paper we report 32 children suffering from acquired aphasia, studied during several years, while rehabilitation was carried out. De-tailed results of this study will be published elsewhere. We report here the general conclusions under three heads corresponding to the three