Sentence comprehension in postinstitutionalized school-age children.

PURPOSE: In this study, the authors investigated sentence comprehension and spatial working memory abilities in a sample of internationally adopted, postinstitutionalized (PI) children. The authors compared the performance of these PI children with that of an age-matched group of children living with their birth families. They hypothesized that PI children would perform below clinical threshold on tasks of sentence comprehension and that poor sentence comprehension would be associated with poor performance in working memory.
METHOD: Twenty-three PI children and 36 comparison children were administered sentence comprehension and spatial memory tasks from standardized assessments.
RESULTS: Some oral sentence comprehension skills and the spatial working memory skills were weaker in the school-age PI children than in the age-matched comparison children. A mediational analysis demonstrated that poor spatial working memory performance partially explains the sentence comprehension differences between the 2 groups.
CONCLUSION: These findings provide valuable information to better plan early intervention and special education for PI children.