Lexicale achterstand van kinderen met farmacoresistente epilepsie is leeftijdsafhankelijk Een onderzoek naar benoemen van afbeeldingen

Background and aim Generally, children with epilepsy perform worse in language tests than do healthy peers. To understand the abnormality better, we compared confrontation naming - as an index of the lexicon - between children with pharmacoresistant epilepsy and healthy peers. Our queries were: could the groups be distinguished in naming performance and/or in cue-related gain; were differences, if present, constant throughout the age range; did acquisition age and frequency of the required words affect responses? We explored demographic and epilepsy influences, as well effects of parental education. Method Forty-five children with pharmacoresistant epilepsy (age 3,4 - 17,9 years; 20 girls) participated, as did 86 healthy children who were individually matched to the patients on age and gender. Stimuli were line drawings of objects with names referring to early acquired high-frequency nouns (VH), early acquired low-frequency nouns (VL) and late acquired low-frequency nouns (LL). Oral cues (a question about the objects’ use, followed, if necessary, by a phonological cue) were given irregularly in case of erroneous or no response. Cue-related gain was calculated. We analysed group differences non-parametrically and explored possibly explanatory variables with linear regression analysis. Results The proportions of epilepsy and control children who named all drawings flawlessly did not differ significantly. Cuing was effective for similar proportions of participants in both groups and the amount of gain was similar in both groups. Plotted against age, the naming scores of the children with epilepsy ran below those of the healthy peers for each word category, but for early acquired words (VH and VL) the disadvantage of the patients disappeared with increasing age. Gain increase with age did not distinguish the groups. The earlier the age of epilepsy onset, the weaker was the naming performance of pictures referring to late acquired words. Conclusion Delay in lexical development of children with pharmacoresistant epilepsy can be caught up. Searching the lexicon is stimulated by cuing, also for the child with pharmacoresistant epilepsy.