Case Study of the Redevelopment of Motor Speech Control Following Acquired Brain Damage in Early Childhood

Abstract

This article presents retrospective longitudinal perceptual and acoustic analyses of the recovery of motor speech control in a right-handed 5-year-old male in the 46 weeks following acquired brain damage. The primary lesion site involved the left fronto-parietal cortex. Correlative descriptions of some aspects of linguistic recovery up to 29 months post-onset are also presented. A mute period of 8 days followed a 2-day comatose period. Spontaneous undifferentiated central vowel-like utterances emerged at 11 days post-injury. Intelligible purposeful utterances emerged at 26 weeks post-onset with the motor speech impairment resolving almost completely within the first year post-onset. The motor speech deficit following the mute period was more consistent with the diagnosis of apraxia of speech than dysarthria. Further, the seemingly lateralized damage associated with the communication disorder may indicate that lateralized hemispheric control of motor speech occurs in early childhood. Finally, the redevelopment of motor speech abilities indicates that the young child’s brain is able to reestablish parameters of motor control underlying speech following acquired brain damage.