| Summary: | This study is an investigation of closed head-injured (CHI) children's ability to assign thematic roles to nouns in sentences of varying syntactic structure. Seven CHI children, aged 9 to 15 years, participated as subjects. All subjects were at least two months post-onset and demonstrated symptom stabilization. The procedure replicated a task designed by Caplan, Baker and Dehaut (1985), which requires that subjects enact orally presented sentences by manipulating toy animals. Four questions were addressed: 1) Is the assignment of thematic role more difficult in some sentence structures than in others for closed head-injured and normal children? 2) Do CHI children have more difficulty assigning thematic role than do normal children? 3) Are any particular sentence types relatively more susceptible to interpretation breakdown than other sentence types? 4) Does the pattern of sentence interpretation breakdown in CHI children resemble that found in CHI adults and aphasic adults? The closed head injured subjects as a group produced more errors than the age- and sex-matched controls. Futhermore, some sentence structures were more difficult to interpret than were others for both head injured and control subjects. The hierarchical order of difficulty for both groups was similar to the order found for adult closed head injured patients and adult aphasics. Several syntactic structural features -- noncanonical word order, presence of a third thematic role, and presence of a second verb — were shown to influence sentence complexity. These features affect syntactic interpretation by brain injured subjects regardless of etiology. The results of this study suggest that strategies used for sentence parsing are similar across brain injured populations, regardless of age. === Medicine, Faculty of === Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of === Graduate
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