Melissa Stockbridge, from the UMD HESP department will present on Language Phenotyping in Young Children with Concussion.

Read the abstract below:

Presently no single framework or screening assessment measure exists for language in young children with mild traumatic brain injury or concussion. In this study, we compared children who had recently experienced a concussion with children who had no history of head injury on a battery of linguistic and cognitive-linguistic tasks. We identified group differences in both lexical- and discourse-level skills, as well as domain-general cognitive skills. Significant differences were noted in category identification, phonological working memory, grammaticality judgment of spoken sentences, segregation and selective attention to spoken instructions in the presence of a distractor, visually recognizing spoken targets presented in a short story, and visual non-verbal problem solving, all with moderate effect sizes. These findings will be used in the ongoing development of screening tools for use in children with concussion who may experience academic and social difficulties associated with language. It is our hope that this research will inform classroom and in-home accommodations to assist children during the period of recovery.