In Brain-Injured Children, Early Gesturing Predicts Language Delays

ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) — About 1 in 4,000 infants has a brain injury known as pre- or perinatal brain lesions, mainly as a result of stroke, with risk factors involving both mothers and babies. Children with early brain lesions that affect one side of the brain often take longer to reach early language milestones; these delays normalize for many but persist for some. New research has found that children's gesturing at 18 months can identify those children who will have these later language delays.

Researchers at the University of Chicago carried out the work, which can be found in the March/April 2010 issue of the Child Development journal.

The study looked at gestures such as pointing or waving goodbye in 11 18-month-olds as a way of predicting later vocabulary delays. The researchers considered gesture because recent studies have found it to be a good predictor of later language abilities in typically developing children. The children's language comprehension was tested when they were 30 months old.

The researchers found that gesturing at 18 months (but not early speech) predicted which children with lesions had vocabulary delays a year later. The results suggest that gesture may be a tool for diagnosing persistent language delay in children with brain lesions.

These findings have both diagnostic and therapeutic implications, according to the authors of the study, Susan C. Levine, Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor, both in the Department of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago....

summary article here

abstract here

Early Gesture Predicts Language Delay in Children With Pre- or Perinatal Brain Lesions

"Does early gesture use predict later productive and receptive vocabulary in children with pre- or perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL)? Eleven Children with PL were categorized into 2 groups based on whether their gesture at 18 months was within or below the range of typically developing (TD) children. Children with PL whose gesture was within the TD range developed a productive vocabulary at 22 and 26 months and a receptive vocabulary at 30 months that were all within the TD range. In contrast, children with PL below the TD range did not. Gesture was thus an early marker of which children with early unilateral lesions would eventually experience language delay, suggesting that gesture is a promising diagnostic tool for persistent delay."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01413.x/abstract