Literacy-related skills among children after left or right hemispherectomy

Objective: Following hemispherectomy surgery, children's educational outcomes are of great importance but are understudied. The study goal was to investigate reading, language, and nonverbal cognitive skills in children obligatorily relying on a left versus right hemisphere using a cross-sectional design. Methods: Participants (ages 6-18) who had undergone left hemispherectomy (LH; n = 10) or right hemispherectomy (RH; n = 14) completed standardized measures of reading, language, and nonverbal cognition. Results: LH and RH groups were balanced for socioeconomic status, sex, and age. Both groups scored below the population mean across standardized measures (RH:-0.79 to-1.95 SDs; LH:-0.97 to-2.32 SDs). Compared to the LH group, the group retaining a functional left hemisphere (RH group) learned to read sooner (p = .011) despite no significant differences for surgery age, and scored higher on untimed real word and pseudoword reading measures (p < .05). Effect sizes were medium (r = 0.34- 0.46) for the LH and RH comparison on measures of phonological awareness and both untimed and timed word and pseudoword reading. In examining the association between clinical variables and reading related outcomes, younger age of post-hemispherectomy reading acquisition and shorter duration between seizure onset and hemispherectomy surgery were associated with higher standardized reading and language test scores (p < .05). Significance: Investigations of psychoeducational skills in reading, language, and nonverbal cognition among children who have undergone hemispherectomy can offer important insights into compensatory potential for left and right hemispheres as well as inform educational programming for children following medical stabilization. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study investigated reading, language, and nonverbal cognitive skills in children who had undergone left versus right hemispherectomy. The group with a functional left hemisphere learned to read sooner and scored higher on reading measures. Younger age of post-hemispherectomy reading acquisition and shorter duration between seizure onset and surgery were associated with higher test scores in reading and language.