Sentence comprehension following agenesis of the corpus callosum.
The sentence comprehension skills of a 6-year-old girl with callosal agenesis were compared to skills of three other children matched for age and verbal IQ. Sentence-picture matching and acting out tasks were used with reversible active, passive, and center-embedded relative clause sentences. The acallosal subject showed a deficit in syntactic comprehension. The difficulty was due to a failure to assign correct semantic roles to some sentence forms, not to a lack of ability to discriminate among the sentence forms. The data are consistent with a previous report by M. Dennis (1977, In Topics in child neurology, pp. 189-212) that in acallosal subjects syntactic comprehension can be adversely affected. Because this acallosal subject is only 6 years old, follow-up studies will be needed to determine whether she eventually acquires normal syntactic skills.
Sanders
R J
RJ
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Wilmington 28403-3297.
D061085:Agenesis of Corpus Callosum; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002648:Child; D003337:Corpus Callosum / Q000503:physiopathology; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology