Despite language disabilities in autism, music abilities are frequently preserved. Paradoxically, brain regions associated with these functions typically overlap, enabling investigation of neural organization supporting speech and song in autism. Neural systems sensitive to speech and song were compared in low-functioning autistic and age-matched…

Children with a history of a prolonged febrile seizure show signs of acute hippocampal injury on magnetic resonance imaging. In addition, animal studies have shown that adult rats who suffered febrile seizures during development reveal memory impairments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that memory impairments related to hippocampal…

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is one of the most frequent neuropsychiatric disorders in childhood. Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies based on muscle responses (motor-evoked potentials) suggested that reduced motor inhibition contributes to hyperactivity, a core symptom of the disease. Here we employed the N100 component of the…

This study explored the effect of thiamine deficiency during early infancy on the development of syntax and lexical retrieval. We tested syntactic comprehension and production, lexical retrieval abilities and conceptual abilities of 59 children aged 5-7 years who had been fed during their first year of life with a thiamine-deficient milk…

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common form of disability in children. Persistent deficits in motor control have been documented following TBI but there has been less emphasis on changes in functional cerebral activity. In the present study, children with moderate to severe TBI (n = 9) and controls (n = 17) were scanned while performing cyclical…

Walking flexibility depends on use of feedback or reactive control to respond to unexpected changes in the environment, and the ability to adapt feedforward or predictive control for sustained alterations. Recent work has demonstrated that cerebellar damage impairs feedforward adaptation, but not feedback control, during human split-belt treadmill…

Abnormalities in cognition, academic performance and brain volumetrics have been reported in children with chronic epilepsy. The nature and degree to which these problems may be present at epilepsy onset or may instead become more evident over time remains to be determined. This study characterizes neuropsychological status, brain structure and…