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Characterising the Long-Term Language Impairments of Children Following Cerebellar Tumour Surgery by Extracting Psycholinguistic Properties from Spontaneous Language
Svaldi, Cheyenne Paquier, Philippe Keulen, Stefanie van Elp, Henrieke Catsman-Berrevoets, Coriene Kingma, Annet Jonkers, Roel Kohnen, Saskia Regina de Aguiar, Vânia
Svaldi, Cheyenne
Paquier, Philippe
Keulen, Stefanie
van Elp, Henrieke
Catsman-Berrevoets, Coriene
Kingma, Annet
Jonkers, Roel
Kohnen, Saskia Regina
de Aguiar, Vânia
Abstract
Following cerebellar tumour surgery, children may suffer impairments of spontaneous language. Yet, the language processing deficits underlying these impairments are poorly understood. This study is the first to try to identify these deficits for four levels of language processing in cerebellar tumour survivors. The spontaneous language of twelve patients who underwent cerebellar tumour surgery (age range 3–24 years) was compared against his or her controls using individual case statistics. A distinction was made between patients who experienced postoperative cerebellar mutism syndrome (pCMS) and those who did not. Time since surgery ranged between 11 months and 12;3 years. In order to identify the impaired language processing levels at each processing level (i.e., lexical, semantic, phonological and/or morphosyntactic) nouns and verbs produced in the spontaneous language samples were rated for psycholinguistic variables (e.g., concreteness). Standard spontaneous language measures (e.g., type-token ratio) were calculated as well. First, inter-individual heterogeneity was observed in the spontaneous language outcomes in both groups. Nine out of twelve patients showed language processing deficits three of whom were diagnosed with pCMS. Results implied impairments across all levels of language processing. In the pCMS-group, the impairments observed were predominantly morphosyntactic and semantic, but the variability in nature of the spontaneous language impairments was larger in the non-pCMS-group. Patients treated with cerebellar tumour surgery may show long-term spontaneous language impairments irrespective of a previous pCMS diagnosis. Individualised and comprehensive postoperative language assessments seem necessary, given the inter-individual heterogeneity in the language outcomes.
Keywords
Cerebellum, Postoperative cerebellar mutism syndrome, Spontaneous language, Posterior fossa surgery, Word properties
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
23
Issue
2
Page Range
523-544
Article Number
ACU Department
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Open access
License
File Access
Open
Open
Open
Notes
© The Author(s) 2023
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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.