Reading among children with left and right brain lesions

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Abstract
Twenty left hemisphere lesioned and 10 right hemisphere lesioned children between 6 and 20 years old were administered a battery of tests assessing phonetic analysis and segmentation, single word decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling. Although group mean performance on all tasks was consistently below that of controls matched for age, sex, race, and social class, few differences reached statistical significance. These findings demonstrate that the majority of children with unilateral brain lesions learn to read quite adequately, evidencing considerable functional reorganization of higher cognitive abilities following brain lesions sustained early in life. Yet five left‐ and two right‐lesioned children did present marked reading deficits in contrast to 1 of the 30 control subjects. A family history for reading disorders was implicated in one left lesioned, one right lesioned and the control subject, suggesting the contribution of a genetic basis. Age of lesion onset was not found to be related to reading outcome. All left‐lesioned children with involvement of specific subcortical structures did, however, present reading disorders along with other language learning problems, suggesting that these structures may play a role in acquisition of higher cognitive functions which may be less amenable to reorganization following lesions sustained in early childhood.