title: Expressive language recovery in severely brain-injured children and adolescents.
abstract: The spontaneous expressive language abilities of 9 severely brain-injured children and adolescents and their age-matched normal controls were examined seven times over a 12-month period following injury. Analysis of conversational language samples revealed a relatively stable pattern of language performance for the normal subjects over this time interval. The brain-injured subjects, as a group, demonstrated improvement on the majority of measures, but only a few reached the level of their control subjects and interindividual variability was considerable. Results suggest that the prognosis for clinically significant improvement in severely brain-injured subjects is good; however, deficits in expressive skills remain apparent up to at least 12 months following injury.
authors.affiliation: Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.
authors.forename: T F
authors.initials: TF
authors.lastname: Campbell
authors.forename: C A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Dollaghan
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000150:complications*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000209:etiology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D008297:Male