How does epilepsy affect language in children?
When epilepsy develops in early childhood, the patterns of language areas in the brain may be out of the ordinary and developmental difficulties may emerge, in which the child has difficulty in acquiring communication skills at a rate and in a manner that is similar to what is seen in most children. This happens more often with partial epilepsy arising in the left hemisphere. In many of these cases, the language disturbance takes the form of a general reduction in a large class of verbally based skills. This disturbance can eventually extend to effects on reading and writing. Many forms of generalized epilepsy have nonspecific effects on a range of functions, including those involving language. But other forms of epilepsy produce definite patterns of language disturbance. Aphasia is an acquired disorder of language or symbolic processing. There are many specific types of aphasia, defined according to the type of function that is lost. A person with a diagnosis of aphasia is assumed to
